Laws that prohibit violence, murder, rape and adultery were developed over the course of history as a result of recognition of their harm, implementing severe punishments if their rules are broken.

[5] Freud himself cannot experience this feeling of dissolution, but notes there exist different pathological and healthy states (e.g. love) where the boundary between ego and object is lost, blurred, or distorted.

Freud claims that the 'purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle'[7] and the rest of the chapter is an exploration of various styles of adaptation that humans use to secure happiness from the world while also trying to limit their exposure to suffering or avoid it altogether.

Freud points out three main sources of displeasure that we attempt to master: our own painful and mortal existence, the cruel and destructive aspects of the natural world, and the suffering endemic to the reality that we must live with other human beings in a society.

In the sixth chapter, Freud reviews the development of his concept of libido to explain why it must now be separated into two distinct instincts: the object-instinct of eros and the ego-instinct of thanatos.

Freud begins the seventh chapter by clearly explaining how the repression of the death instinct gives rise to neurosis in the individual: the natural aggressiveness of the human child is suppressed by society (and its local representative, the father-figure) and turned inward, introjected, directed back against the ego.

All individuals must submit themselves to forming these feelings of guilt, for their aggressive instincts must be repressed if they hope to share in the love which civilized society has appropriated for its members.

Freud concludes this book by expanding on his distinction between eros and thanatos: "When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt",[11] and he ponders on how the eternal battle between these heavenly powers will play out in mankind.

In a nation still recovering from a particularly brutal war, Freud developed thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927), wherein he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis.

Freud, an avowed atheist, argued that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, thus helping a civilization.