The demand for happiness and the response from the ethics of psychoanalysis

Abstract

In a time when happiness has become a moral imperative and an ideal of performance, psychoanalysis offers a radical counterpoint: it does not promise well-being or full realization, but rather sustains the listening of a divided subject, in confrontation with the Real and with their own lack. Drawing from Freud and Lacan, this article seeks to problematize the status of happiness in contemporary times, addressing its ethical, clinical, and cultural impasses. Freud already warned, in Civilization and Its Discontents, that there are no secure paths to happiness; it is episodic and always threatened by the demands of the body, the external world, and relationships with others. Lacan, in turn, displaces the promise of happiness into the field of jouissance: it is not a supreme good, but a movement from symptomatic repetition to a conquered sinthome.

Amidst the rise of the wellness discourse, one observes the generalization of a subjective position akin to that of the child: the contemporary subject is summoned to seek in the Other — be it the market, science, or normative therapy — a total response, a flawless happiness, as if it were possible to escape structural discontent. This “generalized child,” present both in the clinic and in the city of discourses, appears as the recipient of promises of adaptation, positivity, and emotional fulfillment. As a crack in this infantile position, psychoanalysis proposes an ethical shift: not by adjusting the subject to the Other’s ideal, but by inviting the subject to invent from the place of lack.