[Can Happiness be "Produced"?]

Psychiatry und psychotherapy aim at relieving their patients from mental diseases and disturbances and at enabling them to feel happier than they would do otherwise. Thus, part of their raison d'être depends on the chance to achieve happiness by a systematic effort. A "pursuit of happiness" along this line has repeatedly met with skepticism. The contribution discusses for arguments against the possibility to produce happiness - in oneself or others - by making it an explicit objective: the "happiness paradox", the irreducible subjectivity of happiness, the variability of happiness, and the theory that the ability to feel happy is completely genetically determined.