According to Freud’s model, we seek to satisfy various unconscious desires created during early childhood but unfortunately must submit to the demands of civilisation. This tension denies us the fulfilment of our true, animal-like needs, and we are pulled between the two opposing drives: our aims, and the demands of society.

Augustine developed the doctrine of original sin and with it cast humanity as forever alienated from the Divine. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying God, and every person in every generation has paid for their transgression since, throughout the history of humanity, by being born inherently bad. Our inability to heal t

The Aristotelian telos (the idea that human life moves forward towards a goal) had returned, and we could now look gladly forwards rather than only backwards to Adam’s shame; there was now an acceptance of the idea that we might employ our virtue to move towards happiness. God was no longer the austere figure of predestination; He now bestows Grace

Our ruinous, dehumanising society began for Rousseau with the fact that we must work. This leads to us reflecting on our social position, and creates feelings of envy and vanity. The division of labour follows; governments grow to protect the inequality and the unnatural rights of property. And it would be up to human…

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In his sentimental longing for happiness, his self-conscious treading of a different path, and a desire to return to nature, Rousseau led the Romantic movement in France, which was one part of a larger wave spreading across Europe. Around this time in Germany, Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, in which a lovesick man choose

The American counterculture writer Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1999 lecture to the women of the graduating class of Agnes Scott College in Georgia, made the following point: What has gone wrong is that too many people, including high school kids and heads of state, are obeying the Code of Hammurabi, a King of Babylon who lived nearly four thousand years ag

Seneca gives us a model where anger is pervasive and part of our lives, but not part of the propensities of our nature. We are born with instincts of love, openness and accord. As we grow, we tend to become attached to external goods and our own safety. Aggression results from this interplay between our natures and the circumstances in which we fin

A considered life involves looking at oneself in depth, and this encourages the same attitude towards others. By appreciating our own complex narratives and judgements, we can recognise that such things exist to the same degree in those who offend us, rather than perceiving only idiocy or evil. When we consider, in place of feeling angry with each

Rituals confer meaning, Schillace reminds us; we have lost the power of the latter as we have come to scoff at the apparent vacuity of the former. She points us to other traditions that heavily ritualise death: the Toraja of Indonesia who ‘bury their dead in a variety of ways … occasionally … keeping them at home.