Irrational and physiological
needs or desires
A person may feel that a desire is due to the demands in his body, while actually it is determined by irrational psychic needs. He can have intense hunger, which is not caused by the normal, physiologically conditioned need of his organism, but by psychic needs to allay anxiety or depression. Intense sexual desire, too, can be caused not by physiological but by psychic needs.
Although
the pleasured derived from the satisfaction of genuine physiological needs and
of irrational psychic needs consists in the relief from tensions, the quality
of the pleasure differs significantly. The physiological conditioned desires
such as hunger, thirst, and so on, are satisfied with the removal of the
physiological conditioned tension, and they reappear only when the
physiological need arises again; they are thus rhythmic in nature. The
irrational desires, in contrast, are insatiable. The desire of the envious, the
possessive, the sadistic person does not disappear with its satisfaction,
except perhaps momentarily.
It
is in the very nature of these irrational desires that they cannot be
“satisfied”. They spring from dissatisfaction within oneself. The lack of
productiveness and the resulting powerlessness and fear are the root of the
primary cravings and irrational desires. Even if man could satisfy all his
wishes for power and destruction, it would not change his fear and loneliness,
and thus the tension would remain. The blessing of imagination turns into a
curse; since a person does not find himself relieved from his fears, he
imagines ever-increasing satisfactions would cure his greed and restore his inner
balance. But greed is a bottomless pit, and the idea of the relief derived from
its satisfaction is a mirage.
We
have seen that the pleasures derived from the fulfillment of physiological
needs and neurotic needs are the result of the removal of painful tensions. But
while those in the first category are really satisfying and normal, and are a
condition for happiness, those in the latter are at best only a temporary
mitigation of need, and indication of pathological functioning and of
fundamental unhappiness. I propose to call the pleasure derived from the
fulfillment of irrational desires “irrational pleasures” in contradistinction
to “satisfaction”, which is the fulfillment of normal physiological desires
(Erich
Fromm: “Man for Himself, pg 187-188)