ABSTRACT
Freud’s allusion to the goal of analysis as transforming neurotic misery into common unhappiness implies that the outcome of treatment is not concerned with happiness but with the reduction of suffering. In fact, there is no single standard for happiness but many, some of which bear Freud’s thesis out, whereas others contradict it. In this chapter, I examine Freud’s views about happiness and compare them with other conceptions of it from antiquity that influenced Freud’s distinction between pathological and ordinary suffering. I argue that psychoanalysis is indeed concerned with the pursuit of happiness but is obliged to treat it in a Zen-like fashion because of the typical analysand’s resistance to enduring the sacrifices that the pursuit of happiness entails. This is a fundamentally existential conception of happiness.
