The second chapter of Leo Tolstoy's extended short story entitled "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" begins with this memorable phrase: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." The psychoanalytic theorist Sigmund Freud as well as the existential theorists Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus would all agree with Tolstoy's assessment that most ordinary human existences are both terrible and simple. Freud reduced most of humanity's apparently complex drives to a very basic, animal instinct, that of the sex drive. All boys wished to assume the role of their father and marry their mother, but upon repressing and sublimating that drive they sought to please their father. This explains Ivan Ilyich's toady-like behavior towards men of high position, as he seeks to advance in society and simultaneously please these father figures but ultimately usurp them.
             Significantly, regarding Ilyich's early friendship with a governor and his wife, Ilyich is said to be "like one of the family," as he replicates his early childhood desires to become like an authority figure and replicate that authority figure's life and home environment. His sensuality is a source of guilt in early life, but because he sees other men behaving in such a way, he allows himself some liberty until eventually, he sublimates his sexual drive into work, when: "His aim was to free himself more and more from those unpleasantness and to give them [his family] a semblance of harmlessness and propriety. He attained this by spending less and less time with his family, and when obliged to be at home he tried to safeguard his position by the presence of outsiders." His pleasure-seeking drive then takes the form of constructing a tacky, middle-class home for his wife and daughter and playing bridge.
             Sartre said that all people are free, and misery is not necessarily innate to the hum...