Author Archives: Marianna

I just realized why my comment wasn’t going where it was supposed to. It’s been a while since I blogged lol sorry.  -Marianna

Both Daniel Gilbert and Sigmund Freud study psychology. Freud came first, of course, and his theories are taught in introductory psychology classes everywhere. So there’s no doubt that Gilbert learned about Freud’s theories and studied them in great detail when he was a psychology student. On pages 36 and 37 of Gilbert’s book, he even takes a quote directly from Freud.

One idea that the two psychologists seem to have in common is the one that Freud describes as the reality-principle. On page 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud says: “Under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the ‘reality-principle’, which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction, the renunciation of manifold possibilities of it, and the temporary endurance of ‘pain’ on the long and circuitous road to pleasure.” To put this in the plain English, Freud is basically describing the delaying of gratification. We sometimes do things that we don’t like to do, such as going to school or work, in order to attain pleasure later on, such as money to spend on our hobbies and other things that make us happy.

It is possible that Gilbert built on this “reality-principle” idea that Freud spoke about. On page 36, Gilbert says: “People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end. Even when people forgo happiness in the moment—by dieting when they could be eating, or working late when they could be sleeping—they are usually doing so in order to increase its future yield.” So the idea is the same. We do things that we might not want to do, because we believe that the results of our hard work will make us happy in the long run.

Besides this very striking resemblance that Gilbert’s writing has to Freud’s, I think the two pieces of writing are distinct. Gilbert writes specifically about happiness. He believes that emotional happiness, for example, is “the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.” Freud, on the other hand, would probably say that we are only fueled by our id’s desires and impulses for sex and/or aggression. But he doesn’t talk about happiness at all when describing the pleasure-principle. After all, you may be feeling pleasure, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily happy.