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Deciding Between Eros and Thanatos in Our Lives
Life requires many daily, momentary decisions when we choose life over death, and it’s time we began to think about it much more.
Sacrifice is fine as long as we don’t forget that joy and pleasure are part of our lives, too, and if we deny the latter, our mental forces may rebel with anxiety, depression, and denial. Who began to formalize the idea of pleasure being one of the driving forces of life? None other than Freud elucidated the “pleasure principle,” but most people, wrongfully, associate this only with sex, and that’s not what is meant.
Freud was extremely interested in both religion (although he was not religious) and probing what propelled him in his life. Why was he pleasure-seeking? Smoking small, black cigars incessantly throughout the day was one of his pleasures, and it led to horrific, painful mouth cancer. He, therefore, analyzed himself regarding pleasure without researching the lives of others and used his patients as fodder for his theorizing.
Perhaps instances in his life that caused emotional pain prompted him to consider how we strive to avoid pain and, instead, seek out pleasure. Readers may be familiar with the story he related of his father telling him of being forced off the sidewalk as a non-Jewish man came along. The father had to walk in the gutter, and Freud regarded his father as…
