Freud wrote in Civilization & its Discontents that one of the primal sources of human happiness is the achievement or satisfaction of "wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego." Freud went on to say that the thwarting of the achievement of wild sexual impulses is the "source of our discontent." This is one of the most influential statements in the history of psychology.

Freud may or may not have been correct in his assessment. But whether or not he was correct, this idea became one of the most significant statements of the twentieth-and-twenty first centuries. 

With the advent of the internet, we see the proliferation of this belief on a massive, monumental scale. Although the surface of the Internet is "the News," comedy, movies, sports, etc., you know the story.

 ONE STEP BELOW THE SURFACE OF WHAT APPEARS CONTINUOUSLY (actually, much LESS than one step below the surface) is...pornography. Tens-of-thousands of sites, tens-of-millions of videos depict men and women apparently fulfilling (or attempting to fulfill) their "wild sexual impulses."

Make no mistake about it, there is a direct line-of-development between Freud's theory and the proliferation and depiction of these sexual enactments. Freud's theory transformed the world. Where did the idea of "repression" go? Out to lunch, that bunch. 

Day-in-and-day-out, in a million places, people depict (and attempt to experience by observing WILD SEXUAL IMPULSES UNFETTERED BY THE EGO.

If everyone "happier" now? I don't know.

Yet and still, in spite of the massive hysteria and enactment, Freud's theory is fundamentally true. Human beings need sexual orgasms to maintain mental health. The pressure of a reality principle without sex is unbearable. Escape into the pleasure of one's own body releases one from the massive "discontent" which is the quality of "civilization" (now, more than ever before).

Freud defined happiness (1930) as the “satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego.” Society thwarted such satisfaction–being the source of our Discontent. The history of the 20th Century might be written as the struggle to recover the pleasure of satisfying wild instinctual impulses. Everywhere human beings act out Freud’s theories–even as they deny their truth.