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The Ego, The Body, And Pain

1955; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/000306515500300201

1941-2460

Thomas Szasz,

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel

‘We should willingly acknowledge our indebtedness to any philosophical or psychological theory that could tell us the meaning of these feelings of pleasure and ‘pain’ which affect us so powerfully. Unfortunately no theory of any value is forthcoming. It is the obscurest and least penetrable region of psychic life, and while it is impossible for us to avoid touching on it, the most elastic hypothesis will be, to my mind, the best. We have decided to consider pleasure and ‘pain’ in relation to the quantity of excitation present in psychic life-and not confined in any way-along such lines that ‘pain’ corresponds with an increase and pleasure with a decrease in this quantity.’ S. Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle)