ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a theory of human satisfaction and desire. When people honor their personal feelings in more openly expressive and less directly competitive ways, multiple meanings and the pluralistic, antinomian spirit that is emphasized in postmodernism may mark social formations. When personal commitments are viewed as moral or psycho-biological compulsions as in the Freudian tradition society are seen as a struggle against public forms of instinctual repression. According to Campbell, our perceptions of actual standings are compared routinely to what we expect. To state the theory in general terms, people's level of satisfaction with regard to a condition is consistent with the "distance" between the real and the ideal that has been closed. Physiological and psychological processes associated with pleasure are different. In accordance with ideas about our bodies as systems of interrelated elements, this approach to pleasure argues that bodies have physiologically based needs and that conditions of physical imbalance are communicated within those bodies as sensations of "un-pleasure".
