Self-Transcendence and the Pursuit of Happiness

Abstract

This philosophical investigation is motivated by the common association between happiness and self-transcendence, and a question posed by Freud: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” I consider the answers given in three key texts from the psychoanalytic tradition, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Based on a distinction between opposing forms of self-transcendence, ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution, the authors articulate the relation between self-transcendence and happiness in different, but equally unsatisfactory, ways. In all three texts, a dominant ideological framing is discernible, which prioritises the present/positive and ignores the work of the absent/negative, ironically leaving us with a sense of futility concerning the pursuit of happiness. I propose that an approach influenced by Lacanian ideas, which acknowledges the role played by unhappiness in producing happiness, plausibly challenges the traditional conception of happiness that places it out of human reach as the effect of a perfectly self-transcendent state. Instead, understood as the effect of resistance to the notion of self-transcendence as self-perfection, happiness, while still difficult to achieve because it requires another kind of self-transcendence, becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals.

1. Introduction

Even in the everyday senses of “prudential happiness” (stemming from freedom to make autonomous choices and achieving personal goals) and “psychological happiness” (arising from meaningful relationships or pleasurable activities), happiness is widely understood to be generated by some form of self-transcendence. This is particularly so if “self-transcendence” is taken in a broad sense to include both overcoming the limitations of the actual self and some degree of self-forgetting, in both cases allowing something greater to emerge. I have adopted this understanding, which does not distinguish in this regard between “self-enhancement” understood as self-focussed ego-actualisation and “self-transcendence” understood as other-directed self-forgetting or ego-dissolution [1]. Instead, as I shall explain, I follow Freud in seeing the telos of self-enhancement (perfect happiness in the unity of humankind) as equally other-directed, making it a form of self-transcendence [2] (p. 27).

Some accounts of happiness remain within the domain of everyday experience, while others insist that we achieve genuine or “maximal happiness” by a “higher form” of self-transcendence achieved through creative expression, sublimation, or religious acts. These take a person beyond the everyday towards a “higher state”, described as a sense of profound connection to divine beings, nature, or the universe. Such transcendence is said to engender a deep sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as the fulfilment and joy that equips people to cope better with difficult life experiences. Typical of myriad online examples that associate self-transcendence with succour from the emotional and physical ills that prevent a perfectly fulfilled, properly happy life is Paul Wong’s paper: “Self-transcendence as the path to virtue, happiness and meaning” [3]. Yet, despite widespread online promises of achieving lasting happiness through self-transcendence, the historical persistence of the question concerning happiness and the sheer volume of self-help material available suggest that most people (if not all) are yet to achieve happiness. The question that occupied Freud remains pertinent today: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” [2] (p. 37).

With Freud’s question in mind, I explore the correlation between happiness and self-transcendence from the perspectives of four psychoanalytic theorists. I first briefly sketch a contemporary account of the self, finding that it supports opposing forms of self-transcendence: ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution. By ego-actualisation, I mean transcendence of the existing self by the realization of personal talents and potentialities. By contrast, ego-dissolution manifests as self-forgetting. Both ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution proceed along continuums of increasing degrees, albeit in opposing directions. This opposition, I believe, usefully frames the contributions in specific texts by Daniel Kahneman, Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow towards understanding whether, and if so how, happiness emerges from self-transcendence. What links these texts is an account of happiness in relation to the opposition between ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution. Each text takes a different perspective on this relationship. This opposition is reflected in Kahneman’s discussion of two selves and two forms of happiness in Thinking, Fast and Slow, both of which must be attended to even though they oppose one another [4]. I next discuss Freud’s book on happiness, Civilization and its Discontents, as key to a line of thinking that privileges ego-actualisation above ego-dissolution in conceptualising happiness [2]. I consider Maslow’s book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, as an extension of his famous hierarchy of needs where he, contra-Freud and under the influence of Taoism as he understands it, privileges ego-dissolution above ego-actualisation in his account of happiness [5].

In the final part of the article, I attribute the difficulties posed by these influential texts, all of which leave us questioning the very possibility of happiness, to an articulation of self-transcendence and happiness within an ideological framing that prioritises the present/positive and ignores the work of the absent/negative. Underpinning the discussion in all three texts is a conventional understanding of happiness as a psychological state described by positive emotions such as joy, contentment and satisfaction, achieved through various means of fulfilment, including achieving personal goals, having meaningful relationships, or engaging in pleasurable activities. Although Lacan did not produce a text that deals directly with happiness, his thinking challenges the underlying assumption that happiness arises as a matter of erasing all negatives to reach the all-positive. Taking a cue from Lacanian ideas, I add my voice to the argument for an alternative that takes account of the role played by unhappiness in producing happiness. This, I believe, offers a plausible conception of happiness that does not place it out of human reach, as the effect of a perfectly self-transcendent state that few (if any) can achieve. Instead, if we understand happiness better, as the effect of resistance to the kind of self-transcendence presupposed in the texts by Freud, Maslow and Kahneman, happiness, while still difficult to achieve because it requires another kind of self-transcendence, becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals.

2. The Contemporary Self and Opposing Forms of Self-Transcendence

Taking account of the contemporary context of neuroscience, Letheby and Gerrans name two main neurocognitive networks that perform the functions responsible for self-representation, or what they call a self-model [6] (p. 5). The first is the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during wakeful rest and also when people think about themselves, others, and their past or future. Aspects of self-representation that emerge from the DMN, are the narrative self, mental time travel, judgement, planning and goals. The second network is the Salience Network (SLN), which manages the interaction of neural systems that detect and filter salient stimuli and evaluate their relevance to the self. Letheby and Gerrans add that the SLN “links the egocentric self-models that manage the physical/bodily interface with autobiographical models which situate the organism historically”. The SLN constantly creates the illusion of substantial selfhood by determining “which information matters and how it matters” and “by binding information into a representation not of the world in itself, but of the world as it matters to the organism”. Finally, they note, the aspects of self-representation that emerge from the SLN include the embodied self, emotional feeling and salience [6] (pp. 3–5).

Variance in characterisations of the self between something more cognitive/narrative and something more embodied/emotional could be understood in terms of whether the DMN or SLN is prioritised/activated. However, the concepts central to this discussion, ego-actualization and its undoing in ego-dissolution, involve both systems functioning together. “Up-regulation” (activation, stimulation or enhancement) of the DMN/SLN complex strengthens both the narrative/cognitive self (the seat of autobiographical memory, self-description, judgement, planning, goals, ownership of thoughts, reflection on meaning and purpose) and the embodied/emotional self (manifested as heightened mindfulness and a strong sense of body boundaries, spatial self-location, and the personal relevance of emotional feelings) [6] (p. 5). In short, up-regulation of the self-model complex is associated with self-transcendence in the form of ego-actualization. By contrast, “down-regulation” (repression, inhibition or suppression) softens, disrupts or dissolves the narrative/cognitive self, and there is compromised binding of embodied to narrative representations. There is also a loosening of body boundaries and spatial self-location, and a weaker sense of the personal relevance of emotional feelings [6] (p. 5). This allows for a deeper sense of connection with the Other (humans, other creatures, nature, divinities, the universe). Down-regulation of the DMN/SLN complex is plausibly associated with self-transcendence as ego-dissolution.

The self-model complex, therefore, is a complex system that remains relatively robust within a range between up-regulation (promoting the kind of self-transcendence associated with ego-actualisation) and down-regulation (ushering in the kind of self-transcendence associated with ego-dissolution). Self-overcoming or self-transcendence is the motor that drives a person either way along the opposing continuums of ego-actualisation or ego-dissolution. In either case, as our self-overcoming approaches the extremes of this range, we experience the heightened ecstasies and unitive, cosmic consciousness associated with the quest for what Jacques Lacan calls “jouissance” or “transcendence proper” [7] (pp. 9–13). “Jouissance” is a concept that refers to an affective aspect of human being that cannot fully be articulated in language. The desires for “oneness”, “wholeness”, “unity”, “fullness” and so on are desires for jouissance in the sense that they are desires for affective states of being that we cannot speak about without feeling that such words, in their abstraction, fail us [8] (pp. 21–24). To seek jouissance through ego-actualisation is to work towards transcending mundane desires (overcoming our everyday lacks) and perfecting the ego through sublimation. By implication, in the successful pursuit of individual excellence, the self supposedly takes on god-like social qualities—universal love, magnanimity, courage—which enable people to achieve unity with one another, or oneness, understood as a harmonious civilised state (aligned with divinity) in which all look after all. Jouissance through ego-dissolution is sought at the extremes of self-forgetting, where the ego is dissolved completely and we feel like we are part of the unified flow of Being. Jouissance would be sought as an emotional sense of ecstatic, divine merging of all with all.

3. Kahneman: Two Selves and Opposing Forms of Happiness

In his seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist, ties his discussion of happiness to the difference between the emotional “experiencing self” (associated with downregulation of the DMN/SLN complex and ego-dissolution) and the evaluative, reflective “remembering self” (associated with upregulation of the DMN/SLN complex and ego-actualisation) [4]. In this text, Kahneman argues that the experiencing and remembering selves have different interests, giving rise to opposing understandings of what happiness entails and what it means to pursue happiness. Happiness for the experiencing self is sensitive to current environment, social contact, activities, physical health and emotional state. Such “psychological happiness”, while transitory and in the moment, is associated with states and activities where interruption would be disturbing [4] (pp. 11–12). Examples are “total absorption in a task, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow” [4] (p. 376) and pleasurable self-forgetting through affirmative engagement with other people [4] (p. 380). By contrast, a distinct state of satisfaction, or “prudential happiness”, is associated with the remembering self. This develops over time as a more stable, long-term form of happiness understood as life-satisfaction derived from people’s evaluation of their lives as a whole. It is influenced by memories, expectations, social comparisons, our sense of purpose and meaning in life, and our long-term goals and values.

Through extensive empirical research, Kahneman finds that people generally assess their own happiness not in terms of “the well-being that people experience as they live their lives”, but rather “the judgment they make when they evaluate their life” [4] (p. 380). He contends that people seldom genuinely want to be psychologically happy [9]. In contemporary narcissistic cultures, seeking prudential happiness (involving self-promotion and ego-actualisation in the pursuit of life-satisfaction) leads us to compromise day-to-day psychological happiness (involving ego-dissolution). We tend to value education or material wealth highly, even though these are not associated with greater experienced well-being [4] (pp. 380–381). Overall, too, people are less interested in spending time with others in enjoyable activities and places than in creating and disseminating satisfying photographic “memorials” that present the appearance of an enviable life-story [9].

Despite our preference for pursuing “prudential happiness” associated with the “remembering self”, Kahneman notes that our reflective evaluation of this happiness is negatively biased. In our self-assessments of happiness, for example, we do not carefully weigh all aspects of our life-stories. Instead, we select “a small sample of highly available ideas”: significant recent events, important achievements, painful failures, and recurrent concerns [4] (p. 384). In Kahneman’s words: “In storytelling mode, an episode is represented by a few critical moments, especially the beginning, the peak, and the end. Duration is neglected” [4] (p. 391). This tendency to neglect duration and over-emphasise peak and final moments is named the “peak–end rule” [4] (p. 380). If there is a brief but intense conflict towards the end of a generally good vacation, for example, the whole thing tends to be disproportionately downrated. The remembering self is also susceptible to “focussing illusions”, where aspects of happiness that catch our attention in the present will be given far more weight in our evaluation than multiple other relevant aspects [4]. Thus, Kahneman (reflects: “The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience”. Some of these biases can work either way, to falsely increase or falsely decrease our evaluations of our actual overall happiness. However, we pay much more attention to negative experiences, and these have more effect on memory [4].

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman suggests that it is the division between two selves with opposing strategies for the pursuit of happiness (ego-dissolution offering psychological happiness, and ego-actualisation offering prudential happiness) that makes it hard for us to be happy. This is because we often compromise our psychological happiness in the pursuit of prudential happiness, causing unnecessary misery. On top of this, negative cognitive biases also play a role in reducing our prudential happiness, since they falsely decrease our evaluations of our overall happiness and, in turn, these negative reflective evaluations heavily influence our actual day-to-day experiences of happiness. In consequence, those who experience many moments of psychological happiness may still remain dissatisfied with their lives. Kahneman’s analysis suggests that we can increase our happiness through a form of self-transcendence which involves overcoming cognitive biases by understanding them and becoming aware of their role in our own evaluations. This can result in our beliefs about our own happiness better matching our experience of happiness, making us happier. However, it is notoriously difficult even to notice our own cognitive biases, as they tend to be unconscious. It is equally difficult to overcome our tendencies to prioritise one or another of opposing forms of happiness in practice, even if we are aware of them. In any event, since the pursuit of prudential happiness reduces psychological happiness (and vice versa), attempts to negotiate between them yields not a harmonious balance, but an unsatisfying compromise. In the end, Kahneman’s answer to Freud’s question is that we will never achieve perfect or complete happiness because there is an inherent disharmony between two opposed and competing forms of happiness.

4. Maximal Happiness and Self-Transcendence as Ego-Actualisation and Ego-Dissolution

While Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a useful basis for explaining why it is so hard for humans to be happy and why strategies like cognitive training and mindfulness can promote happiness, Kahneman keeps the problematic within the bounds of everyday reality and neglects the spiritual dimension of the human experience that is intimately tied to the concept of “maximal happiness” (the idea of achieving oneness, wholeness or perfection through transcendence “proper”). The desire for maximal happiness, Lacan’s “jouissance”, lies at the heart of so many cultural practices and religious traditions, and it is so intimately tied to the notion of happiness that its neglect is a serious omission. This dimension of human experience can be supported neurologically as the ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution associated, respectively, with extreme up-regulation and down-regulation of the brain’s self-systems. Further, there are two historical giants of the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud and Maslow, who indeed tackle this dimension of human experience in their research. The question turns to what insight concerning the relationship between self-transcendence and happiness could be yielded by exploring their ideas. The assumption that happiness is maximised to the extent that self-transcendence “proper” is achieved is still bound to the problematic that the two forms of self-transcendence pull in opposing directions. In further consideration of Freud’s question—“Why is it so hard for men to be happy?”—I consider first Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents [2] and then Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature [5] as opposing attempts to articulate what it means to pursue maximal happiness through self-transcendence (as extreme ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution, respectively).

5. Freud and Happiness as the Apotheosis of Ego-Actualisation

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud insisted that the purpose of life is this: people “strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so” [2] (p. 25). Named his “enquiry concerning happiness”, Civilization and its Discontents is complex and difficult, but from the start, Freud insisted that for achieving happiness, transcendence as self-actualisation trumps transcendence as ego dissolution. Freud devoted the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents to the “oceanic feeling” that his friend Romain Rolland called the source of religious energy [2] (p. 11). This feeling—“a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded” and “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”—reflects the kind self-transcendence associated with ego-dissolution [2] (pp. 11–12). Rather than seeing the oceanic feeling as a higher state, however, Freud wrote that it was regression to an “early phase of ego-feeling” [2] (p. 20). He argued that the primal ego was a cacophony of sensations, from which the mature ego emerged via multiple experiences of pain and pleasure that helped us distinguish between inside and outside. In Freud’s words: “Our present ego-feeling is… only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” [2] (pp. 14–15). He believed that this was the source of “obscure modifications of mental life, such as trances and ecstasies”, and his impatience with it moved him to quote Schiller: “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light” [2] (p. 21).

Thus dismissed, Freud offered an alternative source of religious feeling. He argued that religious feeling was derived from “the infant’s helplessness”, the desire for “a father’s protection” from outside dangers, and the desire for an authority figure who could tell us what our purpose and place was amongst other people [2] (p. 20). Freud granted that religion as the awe-inspired need for a mighty Father was infantile, and he saw mature religion “as a system of doctrines and promises” imagined to be capable of explaining “the riddles of the world with enviable completeness” and of guaranteeing a just world hypothesis (a caring being watching over us who would balance out present suffering with future compensation) [2] (p. 22).

For Freud, this religious feeling was a precursor to, and motivation for, ego-actualisation as the kind of self-transcendence whose telos should be maximal happiness. To understand this, it is essential to know that Freud first explicitly defined happiness only as “libidinal happiness”, that is, the feeling associated with the satisfaction of instinctual desires [2] (p. 28). Freud argued that libidinal happiness could only be episodic because we derived enjoyment from contrasts rather than steady states. It was temporarily ignited in the sudden satisfaction of our most powerful, “crude and primary instinctual impulses”, the sexual and aggressive instincts, when they had been “dammed up to a high degree” [2] (pp. 29–30). But Freud saw it as rational to think that a “higher” form of happiness, to which Kahneman’s “remembering self” aligns, could and should be achieved through a process of ego-actualization.

Freud built the argument for this around an assumed core pattern of human interaction. Guided by the force of “Eros”, he argued, individuals were bound to transcend the crude, primal libidinal satisfactions of infancy to please authority figures who were able to integrate them into groups with the promise of higher and better satisfactions. The reward for following the path of self-actualisation (civilization) was acceptance, value and a place within a group. Smaller groups were integrated into larger groups with a similar promise whose telos was perfect happiness in the unity of humankind [2] (p. 27). Thus, while powerless against unhappiness caused by nature’s vagaries, Freud saw it as “reasonable to think that we could regulate our own social life in a way that would maximise protection and benefit, and thus produce happiness for all” [2] (pp. 37–38). To manage the potential pressures caused by our instinctual erotic and aggressive needs, Freud preferred the idea of “sublimation” (ego-actualisation) over silencing or controlling the instincts, arguing that this heightened the enjoyment of creative arts or scientific investigation [2] (p. 29). Sublimation made it “possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life” [2] (p. 51). It seemed reasonable to believe that the telos of “civilization”, through which we developed a uniquely human ethical sense by the sublimation of sexual love (Eros) into justice (love of all for all), promised a better kind of happiness than selfish libidinal happiness and the prudential happiness derived from a personally successful life. This “maximal social happiness”, for Freud, would be derived from “the whole sum of achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors” [2] (p. 42). The epitome of maximal social happiness would be reached in “becoming a member of the human community” and “working with all for the good of all” [2] (p. 27). For Freud, it was hard to see why such egalitarian communitarianism (the sublimation of early, infantile religious feeling) “could act upon its participants otherwise than to make them happy” [2] (p. 56).

Freud wondered, then, why the process of civilization had been so unsuccessful and he sought to identify the obstacles in its way [2] (p. 37). He noted that the ideal of civilization driven by Eros (love) as a process that aimed to unite individuals, families, races and nations into one great unity of humankind created irreconcilable internal tensions between individuals and groups: “My love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them” [2] (pp. 49–50, 66). Freud saw that such tensions arose from the powerful force of the death instinct, which manifested in aggressivity (“the hostility of each against all and of all against each”) [2] (pp. 81–82). The death instinct was first articulated in his essay “Beyond the pleasure principle” [10] (pp. 52–54). Like love, aggressivity was “an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man”, and Freud believed that civilization evolved as a struggle between Eros, the instinct of life, and Thanatos, the instinct of destruction [2] (p. 82).

If civilization were purely the work of Eros, Freud thought it was reasonable to suppose that one renounced socially proscribed libidinal instincts for fear of losing the love of authority figures, and once the renunciation had been carried out, one would be “quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain” [2] (p. 87). But our inherent aggressivity complicated the picture. Successful social life required setting up in individuals an internal agency to regulate it. That is, individuals were required to form an ethical conscience, which Freud described as the formation of a superego [2] (p. 84). The superego was seldom satisfied by simple renunciation of socially proscribed libidinal instincts. Freud offered two reasons for this. Firstly, the desire for libidinal happiness could be denied by an act of will but it could not be wilfully extinguished. The wish to satisfy these instincts tended to persist underground, pressing continuously for outlets. This could not be concealed from the superego and, despite the renunciation, therefore, guilt emerged, creating tension and stress that destroyed happiness. Freud added that guilt was exacerbated because renouncing instinctive desires, due to love for authority figures and fear of losing their love, also caused feelings of aggression towards them [2] (p. 103). Often, the strength of a guilty conscience did not represent the authorities’ severity, but the strength of the individual’s aggressiveness towards the authority. Ironically, Freud noted, the superego often became more severe and distrustful the more virtuous you were, “so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness” [2] (p. 87). This aggressivity/guilt dynamic, for Freud, meant that the threat of temporary unhappiness caused by punitive aggression (withdrawal of love from an external authority) was replaced by the permanent internal unhappiness of insuperable guilt [2] (p. 89).

To sum up, right from the start, Freud dismissed the notion that genuine happiness could arise from self-transcendence as ego dissolution. But the process of civilization, understood as the aim of bringing about perfect happiness through a process of ego-actualisation that culminates in the creation of a great human community, left us with an irresolvable conundrum. Interpersonal relations could not be arranged in a way that allowed everybody to actualize their libidinal happiness, because a primary libidinal instinct was aggressivity, and allowing this instinct free rein would significantly compromise libidinal happiness for most people. Instead, integration into a human community was the condition that made maximal social happiness possible. Social happiness, however, depended on repressing libidinal happiness and developing an ethical sense, or the capacity for conscience, in the form of an internal superego. But the superego functioned irrationally to create unhappy, internalised guilt about libidinal and aggressive urges, even if these were not acted upon, but only thought about. In the end, for Freud, the price paid for civilization, ironically, was a loss of both libidinal and social happiness [2] (p. 97). In Freud’s words: “It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual” [2] (p. 105). This left Freud pessimistic about the possibility of human happiness, and he closed Civilization and its Discontents with a poem from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: “To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us. To guilt ye let us heedless go, then leave repentance fierce to wring us: a moment’s guilt, an age of woe!” [2] (p. 96).

6. Maslow and Happiness as the Apotheosis of Ego-Dissolution

It is not unusual to turn to the kind of “positive psychology” that Maslow proposed in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature [5] as a direct counterpoint to Freud’s legendary pessimism. While Maslow followed Freud in some ways, he switched from studying psychological disorders to investigating the psychology of highly accomplished people as examples of what he thought was achievable by everyone. Unlike Freud, who insisted on the irresolvable clash between libidinal happiness and the satisfactions associated with civilization, Maslow argued that it was possible to transcend libidinal needs by gratifying them appropriately or conquering them altogether [5] (p. 272). Further, he was convinced that we could transcend the Freudian superego: we could master its irrational imposition of guilt and our overblown sense of shame, and develop an “intrinsic conscience”, described as the autonomy and maturity to feel only “deserved and suitable remorse, regret, shame” [5] (p. 273).

Since self-actualization sits at the tip of Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs, it might seem surprising to draw on his work for an account of ego-dissolution as the route to maximal happiness. However, in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, one of his later writings, Maslow proposed a higher state of being (transcendence proper) that arose out of, but trumped ego-actualisation. His descriptions of this state align it with ego-dissolution. He distinguished between two types of self-overcoming individuals: “the actualizers”, considered to be to be merely healthy humans, and “the transcenders”, who experience moments of transcendence beyond mere actualization. This group may even include “nonhealthy people, non-self-actualizers, who have important transcendent experiences” [5] (p. 280).

For Maslow, self-actualizers were pragmatic, realistic, down-to-earth, and competent individuals who lived according to a worldview shaped not only by the needs hierarchy (for survival, security, love, respect and self-esteem), but also by the need to actualize their unique, idiosyncratic potential [5] (pp. 280–281). However, unlike Freud, he saw the pursuit of self-actualization as inherently self-centred. Maslow described actualizers “primarily as strong identities, people who know who they are, where they are going, what they want, what they are good for, in a word, as strong selves, using themselves well and authentically and in accordance with their own true nature” [5] (p. 292). This description, he added, fell short of capturing the essence of transcenders who went beyond self-actualization to experience ego-dissolution as a higher level of self-transcendence. Maslow explained ultimate ego-dissolution not as self-loss (death), but as self-expansion [5] (p. 277). This was achieved through the transcendence of limiting self-consciousness the experience of “cosmic consciousness”, or what Maslow called “peak” and “plateau” experiences [5] (pp. 275–283).

Maslow described a “peak experience” as an intensely emotional, often involuntary, mystic, sacral or ecstatic experience [5] (pp. 275–276). Although these experiences were usually short-lived, they were points of no return that left behind permanent, life-changing insights or illuminations. He characterised plateau experiences by a sense of tranquillity and an intellectual or contemplative dimension, allowing for a serene, cognitive, blissful witnessing and appreciating. They were more voluntary than peak experiences, and one could develop the capacity to see in this way. In the preface to Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, Maslow described these experiences, often identified as religious, as moments of “pure enjoyment and happiness” [11]. Finally, those who experienced “cosmic consciousness” felt a deep sense of belonging to the universe, in contrast to more common feelings of alienation from nature and one another. This opened a person to “Mystic fusion, either with another person or with the whole cosmos or with anything in between” [5] (p. 271). The capacity to achieve cosmic consciousness was the condition, it would seem, for experiencing maximal happiness. Maslow described the cosmic consciousness of the ideal human along four traditional dimensions of human subjectivity: self, society, world and divinities.

According to Maslow, transcenders were able to go beyond self, identity and egocentric attitudes, experiencing a self-forgetting where self-observation disappeared and one became absorbed or fascinated [5] (pp. 269–270). This involved surpassing the “will to power” in Nietzsche’s sense, affirmatively embracing one’s own destiny and rising above the desire for control [5] (p. 274). Maslow added that self-transcendence was also “the transcendence of effort and of striving, of wishing and hoping, of any vectorial or intentional characteristics”. Through “non-striving, non-wishing, non-interfering, non-controlling, non-willing”, one achieved a state of pure fulfilment, of “being there” rather than “striving toward”. Lacking nothing, in the mode of “letting things happen rather than of making them happen”, and feeling pure appreciation, gratitude and satisfaction, one produced perfect happiness [5] (pp. 276–277).

At a social level, transcenders, on the one hand, surpassed competitiveness, embracing social inclusiveness and synergy [5] (p. 272). Rising above us/them dichotomies, a transcender’s circle of identifications increasingly widened “approaching the limit of identification with all human beings” [5] (pp. 272, 275). On the other hand, Maslow also described transcendence as the Nietzschean ability to detach oneself from humanity, not through hatred but with compassion for ignorance or stupidity. He cited the example of a 1933 newspaper picture “of an old Jewish man with a beard being paraded before the jeering crowd in Berlin in a garbage truck”. For him, the attitude and carriage of this man suggested that he viewed the whole situation, with himself in its midst, “detachedly from a great and impersonal or suprapersonal height” [5] (p. 273).

As opposed to making anthropocentric judgements regarding the value of the natural world to humans, cosmic consciousness implied an attitude of “letting be”. Transcenders, Maslow remarked, tended to accept natural things as they were, without seeing any need to impose humanly wrought improvements. Their impulse was contemplative, like “children who get hypnotized by the colours in a puzzle, or by raindrops dripping down a window-pane, or by the smoothness of skin, or the movements of a caterpillar” [5] (p. 272).

All told, for Maslow, transcenders were god-like “metahumans”. In peak or plateau experiences, they transcended “human limits, imperfections, shortcomings, and finiteness” and touched perfection. In this metahuman state, Maslow continued, people could wholeheartedly “love all and accept all, forgive all, be reconciled even to the evil that hurts” [5] (pp. 278–279), in contrast with “the more usual mixture of love and hate that passes for love or friendship or sexuality or authority or power, etc.” [5] (pp. 292–293). In this case, he added, “one can be an end, a God, a perfection, an essence, a being (rather than a becoming), sacred, divine” [5] (pp. 278–279), and one could “feel some subjective equivalent of what has been attributed to the gods only, i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, ubiquity (i.e., in a certain sense one can become in such moments a god, a sage, a saint, a mystic)” [5] (pp. 292–293).

Maslow insisted that the capacity for divine or God-like cosmic consciousness was part of human potential. This presupposes that we are, at least in principle, capable of achieving perfect happiness [5] (pp. 274–275). Yet, Maslow acknowledged that transcenders, while reaching the highest state humans can reach, were not actually at the pinnacle of happiness.

“The transcenders are less ‘happy’ than the healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of ‘happiness’ (a too weak word) than the happy and healthy ones. But I sometimes get the impression that they are as prone and may be more prone to a kind of cosmic sadness… Over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to each other, their shortsightedness. Perhaps this comes from the contrast between what actually is and the ideal world that the transcenders can see so easily and so vividly, and which is in principle so easily attainable”.

[5] (p. 288)

7. Lacan: Re-Thinking the Conventional Conception of Happiness

To sum up so far, the widespread belief that we can achieve lasting happiness through self-transcendence is contradicted by experiential reality, which suggests that most people, (if not all) are not completely happy. This resurrects Freud’s question in Civilization and its Discontents: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” [2] (p. 37). Offering an entry-point to a discussion of this question, a contemporary theory of self by Letheby and Gerrans, indicates a neurological basis for understanding self-transcendence in terms of ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution at opposing ends of a continuum [6]. This sets the context for understanding Kahneman’s discussion in Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he proposes two selves (experiencing and remembering) supporting two kinds of happiness [4]. The experiencing self, associated with ego-dissolution, offers in-the-moment psychological happiness, and the remembering self, associated with ego-actualisation, offers long-term prudential happiness or life-satisfaction. Kahneman found that these two kinds of happiness pull in opposing directions. He does not try to resolve this dichotomy, arguing instead that it is important to take both kinds of happiness into account when assessing our own happiness. But the difficulties and compromises involved in negotiating opposing strategies for the pursuit of happiness make it extremely hard to be happy [4].

Freud’s discussion in Civilization and its Discontents suggests a way to avoid such compromises by dismissing ego-dissolution out of court as the route to jouissance, and insisting that our only chance of lasting happiness lay with the sublimation of libidinal impulses and the creation of civilization (i.e., via ego-actualisation). But Civilization and its Discontents leaves us in a quandary where our only chance of lasting happiness necessarily makes us unhappy. By contrast, in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow indicates a route out of this quandary. He argued that we should reach above ego-actualisation towards ego-dissolution in the realisation of cosmic consciousness. But he, in turn, remarked that this state equally evoked experiences of maximal happiness and great sadness. Ego-dissolution offered no route to lasting happiness. Further, the dearth of real-life transcenders suggests that this ideal is by no means “in principle so easily attainable”.

The question arises as to how we may avoid resigning ourselves to Kahneman’s compromise or following Freud and Maslow into the aporias created by binary extremism. How may we challenge Freud’s excessive pessimism and Maslow’s unrealistic optimism regarding the possibility of achieving happiness? A way of approaching these questions is to challenge paradigmatic assumptions made in the texts discussed above.

Firstly, all three thinkers presuppose a conventional concept of happiness, according to which happiness is the presence of all positives. Thus, happiness is increased to the extent that we can overcome and erase negatives (lacks, desires, negative emotions) and achieve positives (reaching goals, successful accomplishments, having meaningful relationships, engaging in pleasurable activities and human interaction, finding meaning, and positive emotions such as joy, contentment, satisfaction and enjoyment).

Secondly, if it stands to reason that full or “maximal” happiness arises from the kind of self-transcendence which eradicates all negativity or lack to achieve a state of perfect positivity, or “jouissance”, then the dichotomy between ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution must be taken as a sign of error and resolved one way or the other. Maslow’s attitude towards dichotomies is a good example of such thinking. In his words, transcendence means:

transcendence of dichotomies (polarities, black and white oppositions, either or, etc.). To rise from dichotomies to superordinate wholes. … to bind separates together into an integration. The ultimate limit here is the holistic perceiving of the cosmos as a unity… where one can see that these mutually exclusive differences in opposites can be coordinated into a unity which would be more realistic, more true, more in accord with actual reality.

[5] (p. 274)

Both Freud and Maslow believed that we had to overcome dichotomies, or binary oppositions. But Maslow’s dream of overcoming binaries by binding them in Hegelian fashion into a higher unity notwithstanding, both resort to the kind of value privileging that raises one side above the other. They also both believed that at the extreme, there is the “all positive” of perfection and therefore genuine happiness or jouissance. For Freud, this would be at the apotheosis of ego-actualisation, where all look after all [2] (p. 27). For Maslow, it would be at the apotheosis of ego-dissolution in cosmic consciousness, where all is one and one is all [5] (pp. 278–279). The value and interest in exploring these ideas lies in their detailed expositions of how perfect happiness is ultimately impossible to achieve. This takes us no further than Kahneman’s acceptance of an irresolvable opposition between two selves and two competing kinds of happiness [4] (pp. 11–12). We remain trapped in a discourse that, firstly, associates complete happiness with a state of harmonious perfection and, secondly, recognises that the inherent lack of harmony between the two self-systems in our neurological set up prevents us from ever reaching this state.

Although Lacan wrote little directly about happiness, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is based on a plausible challenge to the key presupposition behind the conventional belief that happiness increases to the extent that one erases all negatives to reach the all-positive. This challenge enables us to acknowledge the paradoxical notion that humans are happiest when unhappiness also plays its role.

It is by no means a new insight that human subjectivity manifests in expressions of such paradoxes. Instead, this reflects what is re-emerging in mainstream thinking from the ancient Tai Chi system created by Taoist scholar Emperor Fu Hsi [12] (p. 209). The interlocking yin/yang figure depicting this system is well recognised. In Taoist philosophy, according to Suler, the two opposing principles of nature Yin (“negative, feminine, weak, receptive, yielding, darkness, earth, falling, and mother”) and Yang (“positive, masculine, strong, firm, light, heaven, rising, and father”) are related as a “dynamic interaction” of inseparable polarities [12] (pp. 210, 219). Importantly, these polarities do not blend, but rather interact, giving form to one another. While opposites remain intact, as Suler puts it, “they give rise to each other and are inseparable”. Again: “Love and hate, joy and grief, ambition and lassitude, hope and despair—all forms of ambivalence have meaning and definition because of the contrast of opposites” [12] (p. 219). The conception of opposites as intertwined in a dynamic interaction differs from the more prevalent tendency, especially discernible in the discussions of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, to separate opposites into independent, competing spheres.

The belief that we are loved, it is often said, produces the greatest possible happiness. But the paradoxical notion that humans are happiest when unhappiness also plays its role is exemplified in the understanding of love extracted from Lacan’s Seminar On Feminine Sexuality [7] by Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists, such as Bruce Fink [8,13,14], Dylan Evans [15], Joan Copjec [16], Salvoj Žižek [17] and Todd McGowan [18]. Such theorists carefully differentiate between romance and love. To grasp this, one must first note that Lacan challenged the common understanding of desire as a possessive “want to have”. Instead, he subsumed such possessiveness under the more powerful, essentially narcissistic, desire as a “want to be” [19] (p. 79). In Lacan’s words, “love, in its essence, is narcissistic” [7] (p. 6). He explains that we become captivated by the notion of ego-wholeness as toddlers in the “mirror stage” [19] (pp. 76–78), where our reflected self is very different from the flow of fragmented, momentary passions and sensations constituting our experienced self [20] (pp. 91–92). Lacan argued that our own image could excite in us both erotic attraction as an ideal and aggressive hatred as an alienating imposition that misrepresented, displaced or trapped a person’s “inner” being [19] (pp. 76–77). This creates intense uncertainty and ambivalence about the nature of our own being, and even young children experience a profound fear of “a lack in being”, of feeling invisible or dispensable, of being misunderstood, unaccounted for or missing. Desire as a “want to be” first emerges from this sense of lack or profound loss of wholeness [15] (pp. 119–120).

As Todd McGowan points out: “Both romance and love begin with desire. The subject sees an other that provokes its desire and hopes that this other will respond by reciprocating this desire” [18] (p. 180). However, it is romance that manifests in our first intersubjective relations. Lacan argued that, in a romantic connection, we endow our most significant Others1 with immense power to verify or threaten our inherently uncertain egos [19] (p. 80), and thus bestow or withhold completion, wholeness, jouissance or ultimate happiness [20] (p. 98). We feel validated, completed or made whole by the Other’s recognition of our worth and significance, measured by the strength of their desire for us. Hence, the insistence amongst Lacanian theorists that desire for anything manifests as the underlying “desire for another’s desire”. Lacan states explicitly that “man’s desire is the Other’s desire”. An alternative version of this is “man’s desire is for the Other’s desire” [7] (p. 4). Discussions of this phrase may be found by Fink [13] (pp. 53–55), Žižek [17] (pp. 42–50) and Evans [15] (p. 117). All agree that the Other (the proposed source of our ultimate happiness) remains essentially enigmatic and difficult to understand, and pathological romantic interrelations stem from attempts to master the Other’s desire. As a strategy for managing and controlling the Other’s desire, we develop an imaginary relation (of what the Other is like and what I need to be for the Other to desire me), or what in Bowlby’s attachment theory is named an “internal working model” [21]. In Lacanian discourse, this is named “the fundamental fantasy” [13] (p. 95). Fundamental fantasies are described as enduring, often pathological, psychological structures for processing, organizing and assimilating new experiences, which continue to guide our feelings, thoughts, values and expectations throughout our lives [19] (p. 78).

Most of us stall at this stage of development, where the fundamental fantasy produces immature, unrealized subjects who privilege the romantic dream of wholeness and remain reliant on others for validation that provides a feeling of completion on which happiness depends [14] (pp. 56–57). In this way, we become trapped in conventional wisdom that views lack as unsatisfying, attributes this dissatisfaction to the absence of the desired romantic object, and deludes us into believing that the chase for it has a linear end-goal in its ultimately satisfying acquisition. Insisting that true happiness is impossible unless we succeed in “reaching our dreams”, finding our “other half”, or meeting our “soulmate”, we are inspired to invest psychically and financially in new relationships, hoping to ameliorate disappointment caused by previous ones. Were we to accept that no romantic partnership will finally make us whole, we take this to mean we will never be properly happy. As a compromise, we still remain hooked into the ideological promise of at least more and better partial satisfaction and happiness in the future.

To escape the trap of this romantic discourse and find genuine (the fullest possible) happiness in the here and now, we must first recognize that satisfaction with our being is not tied to the actualization of a projected future ideal of ego-wholeness. To explain this, following Todd McGowan, it is necessary to revisit Freud, picking up on an ambiguity in his thinking regarding satisfaction [18] (p. 142). On the one hand, he took it for granted that we remain intrinsically dissatisfied (thus unhappy) because we lack and therefore desire. This assumption underpins his argument in Civilization and its Discontents that while the satisfaction of self-actualization took precedence over enjoyment as the route to maximal happiness, self-actualisation could not, in principle, be fully realised and we therefore could not be properly satisfied or happy. On the other hand, while continuing to insist that restrictions/repressions create lack and therefore persistent desire, Freud struggled with the question of what constitutes satisfaction [10] (p. 18). He found it anomalous that some of his unhappy patients resisted gains in therapy, finding ways to subvert these and make themselves worse again [18] (pp. 15–16). Also, patients were often compulsively afraid of success. They repeated loss and failure, subverted their own interests and happiness, incessantly undermined themselves, or engaged in self-destructive behaviour [10] (pp. 14, 19–23). These anomalies made it impossible for him to deny that there was satisfaction to be found from repeating negative experiences of loss.

Pressing the point, satisfaction (and thereby happiness) is not to be found in the ultimate fulfilment of romantic desire for wholeness. In romance, we see the Other as supposedly object-like. We see a person’s attire (accoutrement), associated with clothes (habits), and these positively present qualities are what we desire. Lacan insists that, by contrast, love seeks “what lies under the habit” [7] (p. 6). In other words, as Copjec interprets it, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself” [16] (p. 9). Lacan names this something (this remainder, scrap, leftover, residue) “object a”, and he describes it as the cause of desire and that which “sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction (insatisfaction), and even its impossibility” [7] (p. 6). This means that filling the void with the positively present qualities that we desire would not be satisfying at all. We experience fleeting pleasure in knowing and getting what we want, but enjoyment slides into the disappointment and boredom of its possession. We are not excited, enticed, seduced, motivated, energized and attracted by having all we want. Instead, this becomes claustrophobic and suffocating. What is satisfying is the invigorating disturbance to our psychic equilibrium created by the absence of what we desire. As McGowan puts it: “The dissymmetry leaves the loving subject in a permanent condition of disruption, and yet this disruption is the source of the satisfaction that love provides” [18] (p. 183). Humans find the anticipation and thrill of the chase itself profoundly satisfying (even though it might be hard work and not enjoyable). The chase gives us the chance to desire; negative spaces of lack, gaps, openness, possibilities and unpredictability make room for creativity, activity and action. This, in short, turns our thinking around: we remain intrinsically satisfied, producing lasting happiness, because there is lack which keeps desire alive. According to Lacan, the idea that “Eros is a tension toward the One” is one of the “earliest of confusions” [7] (p. 5). Still today, overt ideological discourses of ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution entrance us with the illusion of wholeness and the dream of jouissance at a conscious level, where happiness lies in an impossible future. We become entangled in the network of myriad romantic ideologies that promise the pathways to Oneness and jouissance, and this keeps us indebted to the significant others who cultivate and maintain these. But, surreptitiously, we produce lack (unhappiness) in the here and now to create ways to avoid jouissance so that we can remain happy; we produce/engineer dissatisfaction in order to remain satisfied with life; we reproduce our unrealized selves to ensure that the profound satisfaction of the activating “struggle towards” remains available to us. The Lacanian approach to psychoanalytic treatment is to bring to a more conscious level the surreptitious truth that conventional wisdom ignores; namely, that we derive covert satisfaction/happiness from lack.

Accepting the paradox that we derive happiness (satisfaction) from unhappiness (lack), self-transcendence is cast in another light. While remaining the royal road to happiness, self-transcendence no longer means rising above the actual self to reach a higher wholeness through the other’s validation. Instead, happiness is found in the kind of self-transcendence that releases us from this ideology of “higher being”. Thus, Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment would aim to help us negotiate the uncomfortable process of self-transcendence in the form of “traversing” the pathological, restrictive fundamental fantasies that structure our interrelations [14]. Treatment is aimed at turning away from inevitably futile attempts at domination and mastery of the Other’s desire. Once we have traversed the fundamental fantasy, it is possible to see that we are satisfied precisely by what remains impossible to master in the Other (that part of the Other that we cannot decipher, predict and control) [13] (p. 65). This is captured in the Lacanian play on the ambiguity of the phrase, “desire for another’s desire”. He argued that we initially romantically strive for completion by “the other half”, measured in terms of how well we have captivated another’s desire. If this condition is fulfilled, if I desire your desire and you give it to me, we might imagine we would have created the conditions for perfect happiness, since neither of us harbours lack and desire anymore. On a Lacanian understanding, however, this conventional understanding would be a disaster for our happiness, since it destroys us both as desiring beings and places us under the unbearable burden of responsibility to be each other’s all. The aim is to embrace “love” as a more mature way of desiring the other’s desire, which is to want the other still to have desire, and therefore to experience the unhappy lacks that keep happiness alive.