Sigmund Freud was some of the first psychologist who wrote about the expression of pleasure related to the unconscious mind. In “Beyond the Principle of Pleasure”, he presents us a pretty relevant theory or a “principal” of pleasure that in simple terms says all people avoid pain in order to get pleasure. The first thing that came to my mind after realize this concept from the reading was “wrestling”. Wrestling is an entertainment sport (it means that is a spectacle that combines athletics moves and theatrical performance) which consists in matches with predetermined outcomes in order to provide entertainment value, and all combative maneuverers are worked in order to lessen the chance of actual injury.
I have practicing wrestling since I was fifteen and I could see all the endeavour and pain each wrestler suffer in the ring in order to complete a sequence of movements, but after an exhausted and painful day of hard work all wrestlers are full of pleasure and happiness. This paradox of pain and pleasure just made me questioned this principal of pleasure that Freud referred in his book. Is it true that we avoid pain to get pleasure? Or pleasure is something more complex than the hypothesis of Sigmund Freud?
When you ask a wrestler how he can endure all that pain, it is certainly sure that he would response: because it makes me happy achieve a great match. This unconscious satisfaction produces in some way pleasure to the mind as much as to the body. In other words, this pain who each one pass through make them feels better and better. At this point, pain is not a factor that has to be avoided but a factor that we have to pass through to get pleasure. This is also related with Plato says about happiness, we cannot know happiness if we never felt unhappiness.
For me, is a fact that happiness is correlated with pleasure and until we can defined what is happiness I think we cannot define pleasure as well. Pleasure is more than just a stage of equilibrium or stability as Freud shows it, is more than just an explosion of endorphins in our brain in an exciting moment. Pleasure is a complex set of things that can make us feel good. And for those people who expend all his life in a ring trying to perform a great spectacle, pleasure is not more than the satisfaction to finish a match with all the public clap them and accept all the pain brought with that.
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I am impressed by the westler’s response. it is true that they enjoy the process of wrestling. So far, as one of our reading says, happiness can be varied from people to people. but happiness is always simple, never complex.