Freud wrote this long paper at a difficult time in his life when he was struggling with his cancer, financial hardships, and personal losses. He elaborated the concepts of Eros, the pleasure principle, Thanatos (and aggression), and guilt in the context of society as a whole. Sexual freedom, religion, wars, etc., were seen as the results of the demands of the instincts pitted against the restrictions of civilization. Freud felt that human suffering comes out of this conflict. Unlike Freud, Werman considers this conflict to be an incidental cause of human unhappiness, the major causes being object loss, disease, death, poverty, and war. He considers Freud's major contribution in this paper to be its statement of human possibilities as opposed to the ideologies of political systems.