You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Philosophers, poets, and physicians from ancient times till today have invariably recognized that a certain amount of suffering is integral to human existence. Buddha's first Noble Truth declared that pain is an essential element of life. Thoreau (1854) stated that most men live a life of “quiet desperation”. And Freud (1895) acknowledged that all psychoanalysis can do is to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (p. 305). What constituted such irreducible pain was left to imagination, however.
Pursuing this line of thought and wanting to put some flesh on Freud's bare-boned sketch, I proposed that there, in fact, are six “burdens of sanity” (Akhtar, 2009, p. 42). These include (i) factual uncertainty: life is unpredictable and we have little control over random events that have an impact upon us; (ii) conceptual complexity: matters of life are far from simple, as there are always multiple perspectives with which any event, thing, or person can be viewed; (iii) moral ambiguity: what is “good” and “bad” is hardly absolute; such decisions are dependent upon context, culture, ear, viewpoints and contingencies; (iv) cultural impurity: the world has become (actually, has pretty much always been) a hybrid place with contributions of various people, religions, nationalities, and cultures being inextricably linked in the daily fabric of our lives; the search for “purity” is a regressive delusion; (v) personal responsibility: we have to take responsibility for our lived life in its aggression, sexual, and non-instinctual realms, as well as it conscious and unconscious aspects; we have the power of life's agency; (vi) total mortality: death is final with no heaven and hell, no reincarnation, no return or resumption whatsoever. To be sure, this last burden is the hardest to bear, and various religious belief systems readily provide a haven from the heavy weight of this realization.
My agenda was to explicate the irreducible modicum of “suffering” that is the fate