Freud held that, to achieve genuine pleasure, we have to take the external world into account, postponing or diminishing our gratification to ensure its fulfillment. The “reality principle,” first put forward by Freud, is a fundamental mechanism of the psyche that works against-and also alongside-the pleasure principle. And this, I kept telling myself, was the work of the real reality principle. All this, I told myself, because I hadn’t taken a few minutes to plug up a pipe I knew needed to be plugged up. A week later, when mold appeared on our neighbor’s ceiling, I spent an afternoon killing off the spores with bleach and hours on the phone with the insurance company. Now we were up in the middle of the night mopping up our room. I’d told myself that I should plug it up-I even bought a plug at the hardware shop-but I never made the time.
Two months earlier, we’d bought a new washing machine, and while installing it, I’d discovered an unused pipe in the wall. “Our apartment is drenched!” she yelled, and I yelled back, “Ours too!” I knew what had happened.
We got out of bed to investigate and found ourselves in three inches of water-at which point I opened the window and saw my downstairs neighbor outside. In early December, my wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the faint sound of clacking on our window.
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