Freud states that the entire idea of religion is infantile and so foreign to reality that it is shocking most men will never see above it. But he notes that life is too hard for us, so we can’t do without auxiliary constructions. He sees three measures to deal with this: powerful deflections, substitutive satisfactions, and intoxicating substances. Something of these is indispensable.
The question of the purpose of human life has never received a satisfactory answer. But Freud thinks that the idea of life having a purpose at all, stands and falls with religion. He looks to what he thinks is a more solvable version of the problem: what do men show, by their behavior, to be their purpose in life? They strive after happiness, in both the experience of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But achieving this is at loggerheads with reality. In fact, what we call happiness is the satisfaction of needs that have been suppressed and are experienced only as episodic phenomenon. If we experience pleasure for too long, it produces only mild contentment. We achieve intense enjoyment only from contrast, not a state of things.
We are threatened with unhappiness from three directions: our body, the external world, and our relations with others. Men have attempted a variety of defenses against these sources of unhappiness.
1) a full frontal assault through seeking pleasure. But this throws caution to the wind and sooner or later brings its own punishment.
2) Isolation in an attempt to guard oneself against pain.
3) Becoming a member of a community and working together to subject nature to human will.
4) working to convince oneself that all suffering is nothing more than sensation and working to regulate ourselves to feel that less.
5) intoxication
The complicated nature of our mental apparatus admits a whole number of influences. But the one Freud focuses on is one hoping to be freed from some of his suffering by influencing the instinctual impulses; mastering the internal sources of our needs. When successful, there is an undeniable diminution of enjoyment. The feeling of happiness derived from a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is much more intense than sating a tamed instinct.
Another technique for fending off suffering is to find a replacement for enjoyment through some acceptable channel; such as artistic or intellectual satisfaction. But this is a milder satisfaction, and limited to a relatively smaller percentage of the population.
What these show are on intention of making oneself independent of the external world by seeking satisfaction in internal processes. One can take this further by obtaining satisfaction in illusions. This is done through the life of imagination. This region exempts itself from the demands of reality testing so that wishes can be fulfilled that were difficult to carry out.
Another way of dealing with reality is to regard it as the sole enemy and source of suffering, and withdraw as a hermit from the world. But even better, one can recreate the world so that the unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others in conformity with one’s own wishes. Of course one will attain nothing on this path since reality is too strong. But each of us actually corrects some aspect of the world that is unbearable to us in this manner and introduces delusion into reality. Religions are just this sort of mass delusion.
There is another way that perhaps comes nearer the goal: to make love the center of everything. But the weakness of this is obvious- we are never so defenseless as when in love.
The enjoyment of beauty has a particularly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use, but civilization could not do without it.
The program of becoming happy can’t be fulfilled. Yet we can’t give up our efforts to bring it nearer. It is a question of economics of the individual’s libido. How much satisfaction can he expect to get from the external world, how far is he led to make himself independent of it, and how much strength does he have for altering the world to suit his wishes.