Word: freude
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...Lowdown: Like Sigmund Freud, Miller sees sex everywhere; all our acquisitions of personal goods, according to Miller, are motivated by the primal desire for procreation, pleasure or both. Though he advocates abolishing income taxes in favor of a "consumption tax" and learning to buy secondhand, he isn't a utopian hippie radical either. "Unlike many malcontents," Miller writes, "I consider the three best inventions of all time to be money, markets and media." But while Miller does his best to avoid sounding too academic (and has an ear for pulled-from-TMZ.com phrases like "insecure, praise-starved flattery-sluts"), his broad, rambling...
...overseer of the Grant Study results, George Vaillant, himself studied not psychology but history and literature when he was at Harvard; indeed, it may be the literary quality of many psychological findings that makes them go down so smooth for a meaning-hungry public. In my tutorial this year, Freud was sandwiched as a social thinker between Durkheim and Beauvoir—but really, my section leader told us, the Germans read him as poetry...
...causes of happiness has a whiff of the wet blanket about it. But there’s something even more miserable about thinking that our happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist. Aristotle, for instance, thought that happiness was found...
...sages of the U.S. Supreme Court have, over the years, determined that segregating the races is a way of treating them equally and that forced sterilization to improve the gene pool is a swell idea. Generations of doctors bought into Freud's theories of mental illness. Eminent military historian John Keegan traces the catastrophic stupidity of World War I to the fact that European nations began training their smartest officers to make strategic plans. Eventually, they made such fine, lean plans that, like concentrated ozone, they exploded on contact...
...therapy may actually be making us miserable: "Since Freud, most forms of therapy have maintained that the best way to deal with a problem or trauma is to concentrate on it. Through this 'processing,' the theory goes, you'll eventually gain insight and feel wiser, and hopefully better. Accordingly, most people ... think they're more or less obliged to chew over a breakup or career reversal ... [Yet], directing your attention away from a negative experience ... can be a superior coping strategy...