Self-Transcendence and the Pursuit of Happiness
Philosophies October 18, 2023 Andrea Hurst
Happiness is often linked to self-transcendence, but Freud asked why it is so hard to achieve. Examining three psychoanalytic texts—Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Maslow's The Farther Reaches of Human Nature—the author distinguishes two opposing forms of self-transcendence: ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution. Each text articulates the relation between self-transcendence and happiness in different but unsatisfactory ways, dominated by an ideological framing that prioritises the present and positive while ignoring the absent and negative. Drawing on Lacanian ideas, the author argues that unhappiness plays a role in producing happiness, challenging the traditional view that happiness requires perfect self-transcendence. Instead, happiness becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals through resistance to self-transcendence as self-perfection.