What Is A Good Life?

Question for this week: What makes a good life?

As most of you know, I was a patient in Freudian psychoanalysis for a long time. A question I faced while writing the memoir describing this experience was determing the reason I signed up for analysis. At the time I entered analysis, I would have told you I was living a good life.

You may ask, if I already had a good life, what was I looking for when I drove into the analyst’s parking lot the first day?

 I can tell you without a doubt that I wasn’t looking for what I received.

If our lives follow the normal developmental pattern laid out by psychologists, there are stages and steps that we are expected to master. If we use these milestones as our definition of what a good life is and we are successful in accomplishing them, it is a no-brainer – we have a good life.  

 Normal developmental psychology doesn’t concern itself very much with the unconscious. What happens if we include the unconscious in our definition of a good life?  Contents of the unconscious are by their nature unknowable – that is, until they are made conscious.

The main goal of Freudian psychoanalysis? Make the unconscious conscious.

If I would have been entirely satisfied completing all the developmental tasks, I probably would never have taken part in psychoanalysis and mucked around in my unconscious. I would have never learned of the illusions lurking there, illusions that made it difficult to see reality – the reality that life contains joy but also ordinary unhappiness.

You can bet that I wasn’t looking to find out that ordinary unhappiness is part of a good life, but I am finding that it most certainly is. When I expect it, live with it, know that it won’t last forever, know that it will change, I can make a good life.

Is ordinary unhappiness a part of your good life?