ill be able to satisfy themselves by this exercise of rational capacity. It follows that the great mass of men are confined to routinized, against happiness but essential for survival. Freud concludes that the best use of the energy consumed in gratification is in the formation of loving (and sexual) relationships (32-33). What this comes down to is that there are various paths that rational action may follow and that all paths entail conflict.
Freud sees the loving sexual relationship as especially problematic. Eros (as woman) pulls a man toward hearth, home, and the reproductive instinct that assures survival of individual and race--but drawing him away from the project of civilization. But in that project, man tends toward aggressive, destructive behavior (death instinct), imperiling hearth, home, Eros, and civilization. Freud cites his conclusion that "besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state" (Freud 77). And what of the successfully constructed social units? Civilization has a life of its own, which "obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it" (Freud 84). This highest expression of rat
...