Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. […] There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.
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Suggested Further Reading
Crews, F., et al., The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London, Granta Books, 1997.
Hacking, I., Rewriting the Soul. Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995.
Shorter, E., A History of Psychiatry. From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac, New York NY, Wiley and Sons, 1997.
Showalter, E., Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London, Picador, 1997.
Additional information
Katrien Libbrecht, is on the faculty of psychology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. Among her books are Hysterical Delusion: Symptom or Structure and Hysterical Psychosis: A Historical Survey; the latter published by Transaction.
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Libbrecht, K. Mental health or mental healing?. Soc 35, 20–23 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-997-1050-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-997-1050-1