Freud said that his goal was to turn neurotic misery into normal unhappiness.
He also said that the mark of the mentally healthy person was the ability to
love and to work. Taken together, the implication is that depression is
pathological because it prevents you from being an effective person, but once
you're cured of it, you don't then exist in contented bliss. This is in the
classical tradition of Aristotle, who argued that happiness is an activity,
not an emotional state.
I feel it's appropriate to offer these comments here because these ideas are
not too far from poetry and never irrelevant to literature. Consider
Oedipus/All-of-us: totally fucked. But his ruin comes when the play's only
two thirds over. In the last third he becomes really effective for the first
time, because he knows who he is and what he has to do. His story has a happy
ending (though we have to wait for Colonus to understand what that means.)
As to the question of what happiness can be, given the conditions of life, the
best answer I've found so far is Solon's remarks to Croesus in Herodotus I.
29-33. It may be noted that although Solon gives two different and to some
extent opposite answers, they both depend on examples of people who were able,
in their own ways, to love and to work.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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