Why do humans laugh?
One thing everybody agrees upon is that laughter is good for us. "Laughter is the best medicine,” we are told. It boosts our immune system, decreases stress-induced inflammation, releases oxytocin, and bonds people. Even listening to somebody else's laughter releases endorphins, a classmate of mine from medical school made this comment on our class's Internet site, and its members, all doctors, usually at loggerheads, all were in agreement on this one. It goes without saying that the members of this highly competitive elite group are always trying to be the funniest one, often posting jokes that had made them laugh as if to boost each other's endorphins.
Why does laughter cause all those wonderful health-promoting physiochemical changes?
This brings us back to the basic question: what is laughter?
To answer this we will have to go first to the smile. For smiling is the forerunner of laughter, appearing in babies shortly after birth. It is a fear reflex, triggered by random stimuli interpreted as slightly different from other sensations, and, therefore, because of the novelty, worthy of a reaction with a hint of fear. It is not a full-fledged fear response, but a sliver of it, limited to the pulling back of the muscles surrounding the mouth and exposing the teeth as a show of retaliatory aggression. The objection that the baby does not yet have teeth can be explained by the consideration that the reflex to signal aggression by withdrawing the muscles of the mouth is present even before the teeth appear.
The appearance of fear in the baby, no matter how slight, immediately provokes in its caretakers one of the most fundamental impulses of mankind: protect the helpless. As Freud1 put it: the original helplessness of human beings is....the primal source of all moral motives.
This moral impulse itself appears to be a reaction formation to an even more fundamental impulse - blind aggression upon the vulnerable. A real feel for this primal irrational aggression I fully appreciated in myself the other day when on seeing my handyman bent over doing some work on my house, with his back towards me, provoked a powerful urge to kick his defenseless behind. This aggressive impulse could be the same as the dread one feels on being asked to hold a newborn, afraid that one may dash the completely helpless thing to the floor. The exclusion of children from weddings, senior citizen housings, and other adult social get-togethers also perhaps arises from a fear that one may not be able to control one's impulse to discharge raw aggression towards the defenseless rambunctious hyperactive rug rats. Many a potential parent, who quite likely would have looked after his or her children no worse than others (perhaps better because of greater self-doubt) forgo parenthood under the sway of this impulse, afraid they will be terrible at it, if not through actual physical aggression, by maintaining an emotional distance to avoid acting out on the impulse. It is interesting that they often make wonderful parents to pets upon whom they can freely shower the held-back love without fear that the ambivalence lurking behind will cause the animal harm. The dread of senselessly jumping off from great heights, like when one is on the ledges of the Grand Canyon, or crossing high suspension bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge, may also owe its origin to this same drive, however with a twist that the object of the aggression is reversed and directed towards one's own self. Self is treated as the helpless child and the immensity of the height treated as the potentially aggressive grownup. The great moral indignation some people feel over abortion also may be due to a detection of outrage in themselves over their failure to safeguard the vulnerability of the fetus, which interestingly is not felt so strongly by the woman who seeks it, or at least she is conflicted over it, because she feels herself to be the more vulnerable one rather than the fetus which for her does not yet quite exist. This primal aggression perhaps is the most pure (minimally alloyed with libidinal impulses) expression of death instinct (Thanatos).
Let’s return to the nature of the smile. Showing a window of vulnerability to provoke the protective instinct in the caretakers and the other adults around the baby soon becomes a powerful social tool and almost "a magical means" to relate with and manipulate others. The fully developed smile response, with its ability to neutralize others' aggression towards one, should be regarded as the most important social feature the human species has evolved for its members to get along with each other. The smile is the primary lubricant of civilized behavior.
The next step in this developmental process is the emergence of laughter, alongside the smile. Laughter is the brake upon crying by the smile. Laughter is no more than crying punctuated by smiles. In rapid succession, crying alternates with smiling. Crying is a shriek for help emitted in distress, which readily occurs in babies because their level of tolerance for discomfort is very low. However, when crying turns out to be unjustified and the anticipated unknown fearful thing which should have brought pain, or at least a rise in the level of tension, turns out to be something pleasurable and familiar, the baby abruptly punctuates its crying with a smile. This punctuation of crying with a smile, when rapidly repeated, become peals of laughter. The baby replays the scenario of distress followed by pleasure over and over again as if to relive the trauma and the relief from it under the sway of repetition-compulsion,
That laughter is produced from a rise of distress/tension in anticipation of danger/harm followed by an abrupt relief because all that preparation was for naught is bolstered by the observations that mothers make their baby laugh by making funny faces (mock frightening faces) which after an initial brief period of fear and bracing for harm are recognized to be the familiar face of the mother. The same holds true for making animal sounds which are half frightening/half cajoling, where the threat is rapidly dissipated by the realization that after all it is not a scary animal but one's familiar mother; playing peek-a-boo where the distress of the mother's disappearance is quickly followed by her pleasurable appearance; chasing the baby where the fear of being caught, harmed or gobbled up by some dangerous entity is negated by the knowledge that it is one's harmless nay protective mother who is pretending to be that entity; and tickling where the aggressive act of the nail pushing through the skin which should cause pain instead gives the baby pleasure because the nail rather than hurting gives relief through the mechanism of counter-irritation (this pleasure from tickling/counter-irritation in its extreme form is one of the factors behind self-cutting). The confirmation of this biphasic mechanism behind laughing was even more strongly borne out to me a few weeks ago when I saw a young father playing with his two-year-old boy, dangling him over the parapet of a high deck, pretending that he was going to let him fall to the ground, resulting in serious injuries if not death, which the child, instead of finding it scary was finding it hilarious (or at least the fear was overlaid by the hilarity), making him laugh and laugh. Here the fear and stress of falling and getting hurt was activating the innervations that underlie crying which was being punctuated by the realization that the danger was only apparent and not real because his father loves him so much that in no way would he drop him to the ground below. It is no more than “just my father kidding me" which was activating the innervations of smiling, turning the combination of crying and smiling into laughter.
Theme Park thrill-seekers adhere to this same pattern as their roller coaster descends from dangerous heights. Because of the potential mortal danger, this should make them tense up and cry. Instead, they laugh, because of the realization that they will come out of it unscathed. The attraction of such joy rides exists because through this game of tensing up, expecting great harm and then finding a discharge for it by the realization it is not going to happen after all, one can also transfer and get rid of other tensions existing in one’s life/psyche.
Thus laughter occurs when one braces up, causing the brain, muscles, and autonomic system to tense up with a readiness to cry only to find that the tension and ratcheting up of the level of alertness was unwarranted. Laughter with its relaxation of the muscles around the mouth gives the signal that a similar decrease of psychic expenditure (tensing up to ward off potential harm) in the brain is occurring because what was expected is not what is happening. The smile, the mini-laughter, is the main tool humans use to ward off conflict when they meet strangers, as when passing somebody on the road, for it signals that I am relaxing the psychic tension that is building up inside me in preparation to defend myself or attack you. I pose no threat and correspondingly gear down your own build-up of tension. We also smile at familiar people as well when we pass them to signal that there is no need to tense up for we are no strangers. But also we smile at the stranger in the familiar. For just like we know our psyche only to what is capable of becoming conscious, we know the motives of even the most familiar only to a certain depth and no more and the closest of human relationships are not free of ambivalence.
The greater the buildup of distress and tension before the realization that it was all for naught (false alarm), the greater the force of laughter (alternation between crying and smiling) and its duration. For example, rolling on the floor laughing due to profound loss of muscle tone that extends through the body, with muscle tension plummeting so profoundly that it cannot support the erect posture. Such laughter sometimes is accompanied by a tear or two rolling down the cheek which bolsters the contention that laughter originates out of crying.
The person who has a gift for telling jokes uses this principle to first gradually build up a tense scenario with proper amounts of delay and sidetracking in the narration to incorporate more and more neuronal circuits of the brain into a preparatory action mode and when the audience is all keyed up, anticipating some grand action to resolve the complex situation, provides an escape from the tension but not with a solution which is commensurate with the dammed-up emotions but through some silly primary process2,3 logic or some primary process play upon words, like a pun or double entendre, or some incongruous comic behavior, bringing the realization that all the gearing up of the energy to act was unnecessary and the relief that occurs from not having to maintain that psychic expenditure anymore brings pleasure, and whatever tension was already in the system is discharged through the innervations surrounding the mouth. The process perhaps is not too dissimilar from the sexual act, where the built-up tensions from the exigencies of life find an outlet through sexual arousal and discharge through the muscles - including the well-recognized phenomenon of the curling toe - which first experience a rise in tension and then the release (pleasure/orgasm). As to why this discharge takes place through the regions surrounding the mouth and [usually] not elsewhere may be because those were the first set of muscles to become socially functional in humans and therefore are most extensively represented in the brain, and then the mouth is centrally placed, easy to observe by others, and, with its ability to make sounds of crying and laughter, most apt to communicate the increase and reduction of tension. Of course, not all the psychic expenditure (tension) that becomes superfluous and needs discharge can always find an outlet through the innervation surrounding the mouth. If it is quite high, the respiratory, abdominal, and peripheral muscles also are dragged into the process as when one laughs so hysterically that one can hardly catch one's breath, or when one's abdominal muscles go into convulsions (belly laugh), or when one gleefully slaps one's knee or the back of one's accomplice in delight, or when one involuntarily moves one's torso back and forth with the head thrown back roaring laughter.
Laughter then takes the next step in its evolution, entering into its final and most important phase, becoming the key social process behind the ability of human beings to get along with each other. With the smile/laughter at the very bottom being fear response, it became an excellent tool to pair with aggression, signaling that while I am attacking you I am also afraid of you, and the twain when interwoven and expressed together, allows humans to interact with each other in the most nuanced fashions in every facet of their social life. Yesterday I went to a "Home Improvement Show" where the vendors were doing their best to get the crowd to stop at their stall and listen to their sales pitch. It was obvious their main hurdle was the natural hesitancy of the visitor to start listening to somebody that they had never met before. For unfamiliarity means danger and anticipation of aggression. And so what were the salespeople doing to signal they would not bite you if you let them speak to you? They were breaking into welcoming smiles to arrest your attention and make you stop. One woman with her painted blooming cheeks and liberally applied red lipstick on her petal-like lips, which allowed just the right amount of opening of her mouth, reminded me of the girls with their alluring smiles in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. One could not help but wonder looking at her pretty inviting face whether the mouth in humans has not become beside the organ of digestion a substitute for flashing sexuality through the smile.
Human interactions are full of microaggressions. We constantly try to triumph over others not only because our success in life to a great deal depends upon it but because the innate aggressive drive of humans (Thanatos), the death wish, demands frequent acting out and discharge. As Freud4 put it, if we were given full play to our wishes one would take any woman one pleases as a sexual object…[and]…without hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in one’s way. Since this cannot be, for there are strong internal inhibitions (conscience) and dangerous external circumstances, humans have developed equally powerful counterbalancing passive behaviors to go alongside the aggression. Laughter appears to be the most ubiquitously used maneuver to signal this passivity, which softens the impact of the aggression perpetrated and lessens the possibility of retaliatory counter-aggression. Most laughing, perhaps 90 percent of it, is done for the softening of this aggression that we are constantly discharging on each other. Whenever we say something which we think would sound to the hearer as if we are not giving him sufficient respect, ordering him around, slighting him, demeaning him, outright insulting him, raising our voice at him, acting his superior, defying him - in other words if our words, demeanor, or actions will be perceived by the hearer as an act of direct or indirect aggression that will upset the balance of power between the other and oneself - we soften its force by some appeasement that is done before, simultaneously or immediately after the aggression. A hint of a smile or small mechanical laughter, usually with little emotions attached to it, is the most commonly used gesture of this counterbalancing. It has become as specialized for showing appeasement in humans as wagging of the tail in dogs and purring in cats. Back and forth aggression in human communications is often so subtle and indirect, clothed in submissive jocularity, gestures, and allusions, that we often only recognize it as an act of aggression by the accompanying sly smile or chortle of laughter. A bipolar patient of mine who is plagued with having to constantly master a relentless stream of contempt and hatred for others, periodically apologizes for possessing such negative emotions by abruptly breaking into laughter in the loudest possible manner which serves the purpose of appeasement, and yet because of its explosive, untamed, hostile tone simultaneously discharges the aggression. His abnormal incongruous laughter, through which the rage breaks through, betrays the disturbance of his mind and his social crudeness. It is not the kind of laughter which invites others to join in, like the uncontrollable laughter that leaves the person helplessly on the ground where the aggression has been totally overpowered by the mirth and therefore the person feels no need to maintain any tension in his muscles and which invites others to sympathetically laugh along with and partake in the pleasure of complete passivity.
Much of the gracefulness of humans lies in how well a person can seamlessly fuse appeasement/smile with aggression, hiding the latter so well that even when he is taking advantage of others they do not detect it. In those whom aggression and appeasement are defused, which often happens when the anger/aggressiveness
far outweighs the desire to appease, the laughter appears odd, incongruous, and with a gap between subject matter that is being expressed and the laughter that is supposed to counterbalance it. If the gap between the distressing emotion that is being discharged - whether it is of anger, sadness, lamentation, pain - which would be stressful to the listener, and the laughter that follows to cover it up is too long, it indicates failure of the mechanism of laughter to adequately soften the impact of the dysphoric emotion. Macabre, black and sick laughter/humor are terms used for describing covering up of aggressive behavior or thought with laughter where in a more moral person outright suppression of the aggression would have been the appropriate course.
Laughter is not just used to cover up (lessen the impact) of the distressing emotions that we cause in others. Distressing emotions caused in oneself by others, where one is the object and not the subject of aggressive exchange, also is often dealt with [tearful] laughter. Bitter laughter is how the language describes the method of lessening the impact and pain of such aggression with laughter. When one deals with adversity - where the aggression towards oneself is lethal or near-lethal through laughing, it is aptly viewed as a sardonic laugh or gallows humor.
Even when there is no other person on whom one is discharging aggression and one is simply conversing about a third party or describing some situation where aggressive action occurred, laughter is often added as an additional soundtrack, a facade, to hide one's enjoyment of the cruel nature of what one is narrating. For example, a patient of mine who drove four hours from Dayton to Detroit to make it to the session on time, could not be happier that he was driving on the Interstate going North, for on the other side a semi carrying chemicals had overturned and the traffic going South was blocked for miles. And he smiled first gingerly at their plight, as he recreated the scene of those who were standing still on the other side of the interstate while he was sailing happily over the speed limit on his side, and then laughed as if to apologize for indulging in that perverse cruel pleasure (schadenfreude). This schadenfreude varies among people. There are those [masochists] whose aggression towards others is so inhibited that for its slightest manifestation they have to immediately apologize with a great deal of sheepish laughter (in teenage girls it manifests as giggling), and then there are those [sadists] who behave like the Rakshas (Demons) of Hindu mythology who while vandalizing, maiming, and killing, guffaw loudly, which is more a mockery of appeasement than appeasement. Children’s teasing and attacking the vulnerable amongst them, which can get quite demonic, is often coupled with laugher, which as with the demons of Hindu mythology, where there is total lack of empathy with the suffering of the victim, also should be looked upon as a mockery of appeasement.
A patient of mine whose primary problem is masochism, and because of that despite coming from a good family and having a license in a skilled trade is always broke, while talking about his near-fatal boat accident, caused by an error of his friend, described how half of his face has been reconstructed with 27 plastic parts and thirty-six inches of wire, all the while flashing a fixed smile (character defense) which turned into frank laughter when he came to the part where the hospital, instead of saving his life, damn near killed him again when the X-ray technician lost control and dropping him on the CAT-Scan table, fracturing his rib and puncturing his lung. Here the smile and laughter had emerged to soften the aggression, but one should note that the cruelty was directed against his own self which he was enjoying by identifying with the ones who had caused him harm. The aggression rightfully belonged against the person who had caused the boat accident and the hospital personnel who had compounded his injuries, but unable to take it out on them he was taking it out on himself. But after lessening its full fury with laughter, because hidden behind his own self were the figures of his boat companion and the powerful hospital, who could potentially retaliate and therefore had to be appeased.
The way one's sense of humor lessens the pain of ill-fortune also is best understood if we view it as an appeasement of aggression in a convoluted fashion. A patient of mine told me that whenever something bad happens to her sister, she giggles and grins through it. When their mother was terminally ill and in great suffering, her sister's coping mechanism was to grin and laugh through every piece of bad news they received from the doctors. What she was doing was to take an attitude towards fate (Ananke) that no matter what bad thing you hurl upon me I will just laugh at that aggression of yours, treating it as something humorous, and thus not allow it to provoke painful emotions in me.
But why package laughter with aggression and make the process unnecessarily complicated instead of just notching down the aggression itself a few pegs? This may have to do with the need to express the full extent - or as much as one can safely do - of the hostility/anger/aggression one feels to get maximum relief, but which can only be done if appeasement is also offered simultaneously as if the whole thing has been done in jest and not worthy of counter-aggression. By the laughter, I tell the other person not to get so distressed or offended with my aggression that he or she is compelled to retaliate with such severity that it will cause me more tension than the relief I am seeking from discharging my aggression upon you. By the accompanying laughter one makes the statement: Please treat my aggression with kid’s gloves. Consider it as not entirely real and serious, and just like you would not retaliate against a child who hits you playfully, please indulge me in the same manner. And lest you miss the point that my aggression is being done to humor you, let me initiate the laughing even before you do so.
It may not be totally without value to add that laughter is not utilized just to make aggression palatable but also when we make fun of somebody, make a sly dig, or even make an allusion to stealing from them. Looking at a big insurance company check which I had just received, one of our office secretaries once remarked that it is only a matter of time before she is going to cash one and be on her way to Jamaica and then covered up the allusion to stealing with a hearty laugh to make sure that I consider it a joke and give no weight to the underlying temptation to actually embezzle. On another occasion, after charging a patient his co-pay, she failed to hand him back his credit card and instead told him that he was all set to leave. When he would not, she glared at him until he pointed out that she had failed to give him back the card, at which point she broke out in an embarrassed laughter. Here the mistake was immediately realized by her, and by the patient as well, to be a Freudian Slip, and the laughter emerged to cover up the intent to steal his card, which also should be looked upon as an act of aggression. Comedy, whether on stage, in movies, in TV shows or in comedy clubs, heavily relies upon aggression directed towards authorities, which the actors and the comic execute while the audience cover up the full impact of the aggression by laughing and thus protecting the protagonist of the show (with whom they identify) from retaliation, and thus vicariously discharge their own pent up aggression against authorities. Mr. Bean, the English disruptive comedian, is so popular because he goes around discharging his aggression towards the world at large by doing things the way a child would, rejecting the claims of reality and proceeding under the sway of the primary process, which leaves us no choice but to laugh at his immature oppositional-defiant antics instead of punishing/inhibiting them. We also laugh because if he can get away with that kind of childishness why should I keep myself fearful and tense with my defenses up. I can relax, decrease the psychic expenditure on my neuronal networks and muscles, and discharge the liberated energy through laughter, secure in the knowledge that if any societal (and superego) castigation falls it will be upon that clown not me. Our laughter at other’s foolishness is owing to our superego’s relaxing its iron grip upon the ego to always behave ideally, for now its attention is deflected upon the comedian with his primary process (stupid/funny) behavior allowing for the ego, unshackled from being watched, to relax momentarily. To put it another way, though using more technical terms, observing someone using primary process for fulfillment of a wish (an extreme though a rather crude example would be giving into gastrointestinal relief by passing gas loudly in the midst of a solemn church proceedings) allows one to decathect one’s own secondary process inhibitions, with the freed energy finding discharge through laughter. Putting it in yet another way one can say that laughter quite often is due to a momentary deflation of the self-elevation (sense of superiority) which the ego feels at keeping one’s secondary process guards up (puffed up with self-importance) on observing someone using primary process thinking or behavior in defiance of the demands of societal and superego standards. While any primary process activity or logic is capable of bringing a smile to the face, the uproarious laughter occurs only on perceiving primary process shortcut outright triumphing over the elaborate secondary process in achieving the wish fulfillment. When Laurel and Hardy get mixed up with the matadors and Laurel does an astonishing job of killing the bull with his primary process reasoning and actions, it has us rolling on the floor with laughter.
Laughter and smile as a tool to sugarcoat aggression and other mean behaviors alone would not by itself bring the great physiochemical changes that we talked about at the start of this essay, and which supposedly bring so much health benefits. There has to be another element. It appears that laughter over time has evolved into not just a tool to show appeasement, but through that appeasement also find discharge for passive sexual trends.
Now our muscle tension, along with the skin, is the protective barrier that guards our vital organs from external irritants/aggression. If we anticipate aggression/attack, our muscles tense up. The defensive muscle wall that envelopes us has evolved to protect the core part of us, our essence, our vegetative system. So when we laugh, it is signaling to others that perceive no threat. I am dropping my guards and making the vital delicate part of me, which is more valuable than my outer shell, vulnerable to you. Consider my laughing as a signal that there is no tension between you and me. I am being passive and opening up to you. It is not different from the way dogs to show submissiveness to their master go down on their back and expose their chest and belly. Dogs go belly up; humans laugh. Both are acts of appeasement, signaling one’s lesser status. [Incidentally, this may explain why women laugh, or at least the young ones giggle, more than men, and why smiling and laughter lessens as one rises up in social hierarchy, with guys at the very pinnacle of their life trajectory often becoming grumpy old curmudgeons. According to one account (Osho, the Indian Sex Guru of Oregon), Jesus never laughed [for he had no aggressiveness towards anyone and therefore had no need to appease].
It may not be without merit to digress a little and throw light upon a social phenomenon that my medical school classmates were recently discussing on our Internet site. They pointed out to me that since the Sixties, when posing for a picture, instead of looking stiff, solemn and proper, bordering on the melancholic, people now flash the broadest smile, cracking their mouth from ear to ear. This transformation perhaps has to do with our greater tolerance towards showing our passive softer sexual side to the world because of increasing global prosperity. In yesteryears, the portrait painters and the photographers tried to capture a man’s strongest aggressive self, making the statement that here is a person who is no milquetoast but a force to be reckoned with. Likewise, in portrait of a woman, they made sure no smile crept up on the face lest people suspect the presence of salaciousness in her character. Smiling was a no, no, which only the vulgar, the weak, the spineless, the sycophantic, the lewd quickly gave in to. With everybody having so much more to give now, people want to show in pictures how well off and happy they are and do not have as much fear of showing their windows of vulnerability, their softer side to the world.
Now the peculiarity of the appeasement via laughing is that it contracts the muscles surrounding the mouth and gives a glimpse of the red mucosal lining of its inside, exposing the softer, the vital, the more essential part of ourselves. It is an act of making the defenseless flesh, unprotected by skin and muscle tension, vulnerable to others. But isn’t that exactly what a woman does when she offers herself to be made love to, exposing the red mucosal lining of her genital passage by withdrawing the sheaths of covering clothes, skin and protective muscles? Human beings, or for that matter all living organisms, are composed of the inner core, which is the essence of our being, and in which all vital processes, including reproductive activity, occur, while surrounding it is the shielding outer husk of the skin, muscles and sense organs which, while the loudest aspect of us, really exist only as the bodyguard of the former. It is this sweet core, the heart of our being, which we offer to others when we smile and laugh and when we sexually submit ourselves to others. In dreams, it is not infrequent for the mouth to symbolize the genitals. In those whose genital sexuality comes under repression, mouth often replaces the vagina as the organ to be made love to. The peculiar strong attraction humans feel for dimples, a mark of sexual cuteness across cultures, owes its existence to the multiplication of this genital symbol on the face.
Do I have any other evidence than that region of the mouth symbolizes the region of the female genitals, and revealing the intimate aspect of oneself symbolically through the smile produces similar physiological responses as offering one’s genitals sexually?
Now there is a song from a great old Hindi movie, in which the heroine sings: “when I heard my lover’s voice, every piece of me bloomed into a smile.” It’s a very beautiful song, at least to my Indian ears and can be googled: Jane Na Nazar Pehchane jigar – Aah (1953 https://www.youtube.com/watch?
That the opening of the mouth in a smile or laughter and opening of the female genital passage both aim for passive sexual satisfaction is further bolstered by the fact that popular language often refers to making someone smile or laugh as making them crack up; get an opening into their being. There is a saying in Hindi: hansi to fansi which roughly translates: make her laugh and she will be entrapped. A woman places so much emphasis upon a man’s ability to make her laugh because she knows she will be sexually responsive to him and he will be able to crack her open vaginally if he can crack her open into smiles by his sense of humor; one passive sexual trend will lead to the other. The recent fashion of wearing torn clothes, exposing the proud skin underneath – in some the clothes serving more to expose the erotogenic zones while covering the libidinally less sensitive areas (the attraction of fishnets and lingerie arises from the same principle) – is in a way smiling through the entire body, becoming eye candy for all who can lay their eyes upon oneself.
So through smiling and laughter we take on the passive feminine role and appease others by giving them the active masculine one.
Could it be possible that the numerous physiological responses that promote our health when we smile and laugh occur because they are mini-sexual expressions?
In his last decade, Freud8, on more than one occasion wrote to the effect that just like he worked upon the delineation of psychopathology from the angle of libido, somebody, who is freshly starting out and has the luxury of time on his side, which he (Freud) no longer does, should elucidate it from the angle of aggression. In this essay, I have tried to trace some of the vicissitudes of aggression, and its binding and neutralization through the reflex of smiling and laughter. While quite a few fresh observations on the nature of laughter have been presented here, two deserve special mention. One, that laughter is not so much signaling to others that one is experiencing pleasure due to perceiving primary process thinking or behavior but to soften the impact of aggression in interpersonal interactions. Second, that while the smile arose as a fear reflex to evoke the protective instinct of the newborn’s caretakers, it has evolved into a major conduit for expressing passive sexuality.
References:
1. Freud, S. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition. 1: 318.
2. Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. 12: 218-226.
3. Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. Standard Edition, 14: 159-204.
4. Freud, S. (1927). Future of an illusion. Standard Edition. 21:15.
5. Spencer, H. (1860). Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1860 pp. 395-402.
6. Freud, S. (1905). Jokes and their relationship to the unconscious. Standard Edition. 8.
7. Freud, S. (1927). Humour. Standard Edition.21.
8. Freud, S. (1933). The new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Standard Edition. 22: 105.
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