Freud's idea of rational action is that it is in perpetual tension with emotional and especially sexual desire toward gratification but that a desire for and engagement in both rational action and satisfaction of desire characterizes human experience. However, rational action per se comes about as the individual ego evolves from infancy to adulthood, increasingly experiencing the fact that it and the organism that it inhabits is different from (and alien to) the world that is external to it: "originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself" (Freud 15).
Alienation of the ego from the world arises out of recognition of the separation. The ego encounters conflict even as it seeks satisfaction, or happiness, and as it seeks to accommodate itself to what is other, the world, in hope of experiencing happiness. Freud cites the "dichotomy" of human aims: "man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize . . . the one or the other of these aims" (25). Man is pulled toward social interaction to avoid isolation but away from it to avoid inevitable human conflict. Impulse toward rational action is an impulse away from the experience of conflict. Freud connects it to an impulse toward social interaction, which involves "becoming a member of the human community, and with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will" (27). Another rational strategy displaces impulses of sexual drive, or libido, "in such a way that they cannot some up against frustration from the external world" (29). Work that is "psychical" or "intellectual"--i.e., highly active in a rational, or mental, way--is most likely to be successful, according to Freud. But Freud cannot avoid the conflict embedded in such a solution, for mental creativity or brilliance "is accessible to only a few people" (30). In other words, only a few w...