In his book Civilization and Its Discontent, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, claims that it is a brute fact that achieving happiness is impossible. Despite this, he says people employ various, ultimately unsuccessful strategies to compensate for this fact. One of these means, and the only one that Freud seems to feel provides any sense of satisfaction as to why happiness cannot be obtained, is found in the realm of religion. For those who are not fully ingrained in the religious pursuit and even for those who are, the inability to discover happiness leads to a number of ways in which people seek to at least avoid pain. Eventually, Freud says people turn to love as the answer to this desire for happiness. When this fails, we attempt to control our social worlds through a variety of means and then finally come to accept that guilt and unhappiness are pervasive and they again seek the answers they failed to find in religion. This cycle of a fruitless search for happiness is discussed throughout Freud’s book. In his book, Freud indicates that the question regarding the purpose of human life, a question that continues to be asked throughout the ages, is only seen to be answered satisfactorily to those individuals who believe in religion, by religion. However, a look into the ways in which men live their lives suggests a different answer. Examining the way in which people live their lives, the answer seems obvious, people seek happiness. “As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start” (Freud, 1930: 23). Although we strive to feel pleasure in all things, Freud points out that the human being is incapable of feeling anything more than contentment in the absence of any strife. On the other hand, there are many aspects of life that are, by their nature, capable of inflicting pain or discomfort, including biological forces upon the human body, the external world in general and the actions of other men in particular. To ensure a life full of happiness, Freud suggests people use several different means of fulfilling the pleasure principle while attempting to ignore reality. The pleasure principle refers to the demand felt by all humans to take care of needs immediately. “Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn’t ‘know’ what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now” (Boeree, 2006). This search for pleasure and escape from pain introduces various means and strategies in which the individual might seek to avoid pain and seek pleasure including isolation, inclusion and in the dulling of sensation. Sensations can be dulled through various, including intoxication, trancelike separation or sublimation of instinctual desires to other activities. “A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher’” (Freud, 1930: 26). Despite this, in all cases, Freud insists that the feelings of pleasure are of a much milder quality than the satisfaction of