I am therefore ill at ease with people who earnestly abstain from such things as smoking, drinking, and sex, to the point of making them squeamishnessly militant.  Obviously, there are forms and degrees in which these pleasures can be unhygienic, as also can be driving cars, climbing mountains, and nursing the sick.  There are points of view from which almost everything can be see as bad for one's health, and Jung once remarked in jest that life itself is a disease with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.  And in this connection I might also quote Freud, writing to Dr. Fleisch: 'As to your injunction to give up smoking, I have decided not to comply.  Do you think it such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?

• asceticism
• freud
• jung
• life
• pleasure
• sexuality
• death
• smoking
• writing
• sex
• disease