Direction: The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various, but all have something in common. The typical unhappy man, is one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other and has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of ‘pleasure'. This is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.