Amidst my high strung emotional state, I turned to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents to connect to sanity. Better yet, I found answers.
“… in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances – for instance, through a sufficiently long regression”
” In the psychical sphere some things that are old are so obscured or consumed- that there is no longer any way of restoring and reviving them, or that their retention is linked to certain favourable conditions. This may be so, but we have no way of knowing. All we can do is hold on to the fact that in mental life the retention of the past is the rule, rather than a surprising exception”
“It is asserted that in some way each of us behaves like a paranoiac, employing wishful thinking to correct some unendurable aspect of the world and introducing this delusion into reality…… of course no one who still shares a delusion will ever recognise it as such.”
“We ought to be content to infer from this observation that power over nature is not the sole condition of human happiness, just as it is not the sole aim of cultural endeavours, rather than to conclude that technical progress is of no value in the economy of our happiness.”
Beautiful, compelling answers.
I find the power of pen a thorough comfort in my dark innate ‘death drive’. They have inspired and enlightened me – providing insights to the psychological state and offering an alternative route out of the terrible burdens of life.
Perhaps, it is what it is.
And perhaps, yes – Happiness might not be the consequence of power over nature.
