Limits between habit and addiction

Abstract

Freud, in Discontents in Civilization, in reflections from 1930, describes three sources of human pain: the power of nature; human impotence in the limits of the body and in fragility; and the insufficiency of norms to regulate reciprocal bonds, in families, in the state, in society. These are effects that, with their randomness, pose a strong challenge in the face of these disturbing strangenesses of human life. Emergencies make humans reckless in their path to facing helplessness and unpreparedness. When we build we achieve transformations. Freud studied the foundations of Culture, which he describes as a reflection, on a larger scale, of conflicts within individuals. Fair or unfair, culture resorts to coercion to impose its norms and, in this task, it achieves the goal reasonably well. For the psychic collection of culture, ideals are valuable, it is the sacred that cannot be profaned. Just as valuable are ideas and thoughts, this is when arguments prevail over intensities and passions. From phylogenesis to ontogenesis, humans creatively developed repetition, and today they are capable of thinking, reading or writing poetry. The ability to replace an act, a specific action with ideas, thoughts, elaborations, is the difference between the primitive perspective of origin and the complexity of civilizational evolution.