The Psychology of Adaptation To Absurdity: Tactics of Make-believe

279 Pages·2016·1.83 MB·English

by  Seymour Fisher and Rhoda Fisher

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADAPTATION
TO ABSURDITY
Tactics of Make-Believe
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADAPTATION
TO ABSURDITY
Tactics of Make-Believe
Seymour Fisher
State University of New York
Health Science Center at Syracuse
Rhoda L. Fisher
Private practice, Syracuse, New York

To our family—Drs. Jerid Fisher, Eve Fisher-Whitmore, and
Mark Whitmore. Also special regards to all the court jesters
and other expert practitioners of absurdity out there.
CONTENTS
Preface
1 What to Do About Absurdity?
2 How Difficult Is It to Be Human?
3 What Is Death Anxiety and How Pervasive Is It?
4 The Problems of Uncertainty and Insignificance
5 Testing the Buffering Power of Religious Imagery
6 Learning How to Pretend and Make Things Up
7 Classical Defense Mechanisms
8 How Do Make-Believe and Psychopathology Intersect?
9 Conjuring Up a Self
10 Somatic Consequences of Illusions
11 Larger Perspectives
References
Author Index
Subject Index
PREFACE
All cultures are infused with make-believe and magic. Even infants learn quickly
that they must learn how to pretend; and they shortly become experts in fantasy
construction. Daily life is filled with the fictions of novels, television, theater,
and religious myths. We all learn to dissimulate, put on facades and masks, and
daydream. People are forever toying with the potential unreality and, not
infrequently, the absurdity of what they are experiencing. The comedians and
dramatists of the world are fond of reminding us that all is not what it appears to
be.
What is the significance of our preoccupation with make-believe? Why do we
flirt so often with images depicting radical new versions of the world? Why are
we so fascinated with fiction and pretense?
The major goal of this book is to explore and integrate all that is scientifically
known about the utility of magical plans and strategies for coping with life’s
inevitable absurdities. Obviously, make-believe has great adaptive value. We
wish to probe in detail how it helps the average individual to function better in a
world saturated with contradiction and paradox. We trace the origins of
pretending (illusion construction) and the developmental phases of this skill. We
analyze how parents depend on pretending to secure conformity and self-control
from their children. We unravel the ways in which make-believe is utilized to
defend against death anxiety and feelings of fragility and insignificance. We
examine the relationship between pretending and classical defense mechanisms.
We test the protective powers of illusory constructs by investigating how well
they have functioned in the context of religious myths. We also define the
diverse contributions of make-believe to the construction of the self-concept, the
defensive maneuvers of the psychologically distressed, and the maintenance of
somatic health.
In short, this book pulls together all of the available scientific information and
data concerning the defensive value of illusory make-believe in coping with
those aspects of life that are experienced as unreasonable and beyond
understanding.
An undertaking of this sort calls for the integration of a striking spectrum of
research. We have drawn on literatures from such diverse sources as social,
clinical, developmental, and cognitive psychology, psychiatry, anthropology,
religion, psychosomatics, and the history of magic. This means that we often
have had to bridge between concepts that are ordinarily not considdered to be
contiguous. The very diversity of the materials examined represented an obstacle
to putting all of the pieces neatly together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are appreciative of the support for our work that was provided by the
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the State University of
New York Health Science Center (Syracuse). We had the benefit of a
comfortable scholarly setting in which there was the right mix of those elements
that facilitate the cycle of producing a book. Special thanks to the Health Science
Center’s library that patiently delivered superb service. Further, we would like to
acknowledge Dr. Roger Greenberg’s helpful observations concerning the
relationship between absurdity and psychopathology.
Seymour Fisher
Rhoda L. Fisher
CHAPTER
1
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ABSURDITY?
The comedians of the world have known from the beginning that the conditions
of human existence, if viewed directly and rationally, appear somewhat absurd.
In an earlier book (Fisher & Fisher, 1981), we studied a variety of comedians
and clowns by means of interviews and formal psychological tests and learned a
good deal about their personal conflicts and comedic strategies. One of the
points that particularly impressed us about these people, who are so dedicated to
being funny, is that they forever feel called upon to shield people from the
threats and forebodings typifying modal life on this planet. As the result of early
transactions with their parents they feel obligated to soothe others and to
interpose themselves against the bad things “out there.” They are weighted down
by a poignant sense of duty to help those who come asking for the antidote
provided by humor against human misfortune.
It is apropos in this respect that the early court jesters were assigned the role
of protecting the king against the chaotic and uncontrolled forces in the universe.
The jesters were considered to be qualified for such a role because their foolish
strangeness and deviance intimated they were in contact with, and could
potentially influence, analogous outlandish phenomena. Paradoxically, even as
the funny ones soothe and protect, they also provoke. They go out of their way
to conjure up images of threatening, forbidden stuff (variously relating to sex,
death, anality, and hypocrisy). But each provocation is bathed in humor and the
reassurance that there is nothing to fear from the threatening theme because it is,
after all, only one more example of something ridiculous and absurd. The
provocation functions in a fashion analogous to an injection of an attenuated
virus intended to initiate the body’s manufacture of a proper antibody. Much of
the power of comedians resides in the fact that they can infuse images of the
world with the flavor of unreal absurdity. We (Fisher & Fisher, 1981) originally
depicted comedians as “Einsteins of the moral world” who do not respect one set
of rules or moral principles more than any other. They communicate to their
audiences that nothing is sacred. They scorn convention. They repeatedly shift
their perspectives on events. With one joke they belittle the radical and in the
next they make fun of the conservative. They are loyal only to the novel and the
paradoxical.
Comedians revel in their play with potentially universal nonsense. They
dramatize this apparent nonsense and simultaneously tell us it is nothing to
worry about. We have suggested further (Fisher & Fisher, 1981) that comics
love to intimate that anything is possible. They dramatize the unpredictable
nature of things. They tell people that they are involved with forces that
inevitably will go off into unexpected trajectories. They conjure up images of a
Dali-like landscape pervaded by the surrealistic. They know that stark surprise
faces all of us. Their comedy leads one to expect novel intrusion by highlighting
that customary and apparently dependable rules are illusory. Because they
ridicule the very nature of logic, how is it possible to reason or control?
Basically, comedians prepare their audiences for chaos and perhaps even
persuade them that chaos can be fun.
It is an interesting paradox that although comics are sensitizing the audience
to the unexpected they imply that they have control over it. Court jesters and
similar funny fools had a special, although strange status, because it was widely
believed that they were capable of defending against chaos. Modern comics, in
their play with funny images and nonsensical unpredictability, also convey a
sense of ease with the chaotic stuff. They are apparently relaxed and happy in
the midst of this stuff. They imply that they can influence what will happen and
that there is probably nothing to fear. They arouse anxiety about concealed
dangers, but at the same time provide soothing reassurance.
In other words, comics stand before us as outstanding practitioners of absurd
images. They tease us with the idea that life is silly and ridiculous. They mock
us with the possibility that there is only absurdity. But more fundamentally, they
seduce us with the illusory protective promises of humor. They even suggest that
absurdity is preferable to worse things that exist.
We know (Fisher & Fisher, 1981) that just about all cultures have reserved a
valued niche for clowns and other kinds of clever “fools” in one guise or
another. The near universality of the comic role is intriguing. It is as if there is a