False pleasure may be a pleasure based on a false belief (as of supposedly having come into money), or a pleasure deemed to be in some way false, perhaps by comparison with truer, realler, or higher pleasures.
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Lacan maintained that philosophers should seek to "discern not true pleasures from false, for such a distinction is impossible to make, but the true and false goods that pleasure points to".
Classical philosophy
Plato devoted much attention to the belief that "no pleasure save that of the wise is quite true and pure - all others are shadows only" - both in The Republic and in his late dialogue Philebus.
Augustine saw false pleasure as focused on the body, as well as pervading the dramatic and rhetorical entertainments of his time.
Asceticism
Buddhaghosa considered that "sense-pleasures are impermanent, deceptive, trivial...unstable, unreal, hollow, and uncertain" - a view echoed in most of what Max Weber termed "world-rejecting asceticism".
Vain pleasure
A specific false pleasure often denounced in Western thought is the pleasure of vanity - Voltaire for example pillorying the character "corrupted by vanity...He breathed in nothing but false glory and false pleasures".
Similarly John Ruskin contrasted the adult's pursuit of the false pleasure of vanity with the way the child does not seek false pleasures; its pleasures are true, simple, and instinctive".
Sex
Sexual intercourse is sometimes seen as a true pleasure (or false one), contrasted with the less real pleasures of the past, as with Donne's "countrey pleasures, childishly".
In the wake of Reich, a distinction was sometimes made between reactive and genuine sexuality - analysis supposedly allowing people to "realize the enormous difference between what they once believed sexual pleasure to be and what they now experience".
Mass media
Popular culture has been a central arena for latter-day disputes over true and false pleasures. Modernism saw attacks on the false pleasures of consumerism from the right, as well as from the left, with Herbert Marcuse denouncing the false pleasures of happy consciousness of "those whose life is the hell of the affluent society".
From another angle, Richard Hoggart contrasted the immediate, real pleasures of the working-class from the increasingly ersatz diet fed them by the media.
As the 20th Century wore on, however - while concern for the contrast of false and authentic pleasures, fragmented or integrated experiences, certainly remained - the mass media increasingly became less of a scapegoat for the prevalence of false pleasure, figures like Frederic Jameson for example insisting instead on "the false problem of value" in a world where "reification or materialization is a key structural feature of both modernism and mass culture".
Žižek
Slavoj Žižek had added a further twist to the debate for the 21st century, arguing that in a postmodern age dominated by what he calls "the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse", the quest for pleasure has become more of a duty than a pleasure: for Žižek, "psychoanalysis is the only discipline in which you are allowed not to enjoy" !