Thrills and Regressions

Michael Balint

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429922992
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Contents: Part One - Thrills; Part Two - Regressions; Part Three: Appendix; Part Four - Conclusions. This book includes the paper "Distance in Time and Space" by Enid Balint.

Part One
Thrills

I
Funfairs¹ and Thrills

FUNFAIRS exist all over the world, from Bombay to San Francisco and from Alaska to New Zealand. Being so universal, they must respond to some essential human needs. We may even add, knowing what funfairs are, that the essential human needs they satisfy must stem from rather primitive layers of the mind.

Funfairs mean a break in the daily routine, in the exacting discipline of working life. They bring about an easing-off of the strict rules governing the life of society. In this sense they offer something akin to all other 'holidays'. They have, however, special features which are peculiar to funfairs alone. These are represented partly by the kind of amusements and pleasures they offer, and partly by the way people feel towards these amusements and pleasures and behave when enjoying them.

The traditional pleasures found at funfairs may be classified under several headings. My list is certainly incomplete, but I hope it includes the most important items, (a) Food; (b) aggressive pleasures, such as throwing or shooting at things, smashing things up, etc.; (c) pleasures connected with dizziness, vertigo, impairment or loss of stability, such as swings, roundabouts, switchbacks; (d) various shows similar to but more primitive and cruder than those offered in circuses and theatres; (e) games of chance, either offered openly as such or slightly camouflaged as games of skill, the chances being usually heavily loaded against the player and the prizes offered hardly worth the stake; (f) soothsayers; (g) lastly, a comparative new-comer, the slot machine, offering either various peepshows or games of chance. In this chapter I shall discuss at any length only the first three kinds of these pleasures, in the hope that the results will throw some light on the other groups as well. The main discussion will be centred on the pleasures involving giddiness.

The first of these three groups of pleasures is the very primitive catering. The traditional foods sold at funfairs must generally have two characteristics—they must be very sweet and very cheap. Often the types of sweets sold there are peculiar to funfairs and are sold hardly anywhere else or on any other occasions; this, however, is not an absolute rule.

The next group comprises the aggressive games, such as target shooting, testing one's strength, and even purely destructive ones like 'breaking up the happy home', where cheap china is displayed to be smashed up with wooden balls. The psychodynamics of these two groups of pleasures can be described up to a point by our existing terminology. They both represent opportunities for regression, i.e. they offer satisfaction for primitive instincts on a fairly primitive level: the first group to the oral, and the second to the destructive or aggressive instincts. Seen from this angle, funfairs are safety valves for pent-up emotions and instinctual urges which, in civilised and well-brought-up adults, must remain unsatisfied, and which are offered periodical outlets on a primitive level within safe limits.

So far so good. But there is one essential characteristic of the second group of pleasures which is not so easy to describe with our present 'oral' terminology. Not only is the individual allowed to give free rein to his aggressiveness, but—and this is equally important—he is rewarded for it, his aggressiveness is accepted and approved of by his environment even though it is broken up and destroyed in the process. The less anxiety and inhibition the individual feels, the more aggressive or destructive he can be; the more efficient is his performance, the higher is the prize awarded: for hitting the bull's-eye, for sending the marker to the highest point, for smashing the most china, and so on. Expressed in psychological terms, this means that the environment not only tolerates aggressiveness and destructiveness and offers opportunities for them, but also, in a way, rejoices with the individual in its own destruction.

This is rather a strange object relationship. Usually one's environment does not go so far; in fact, this is almost an exact reversal of the common situations hitherto studied. In them it is the environment—or one or more powerful persons in it—that is aggressive to the individual. Since the inequality between the individual and his aggressive objects is felt to be overwhelming, any struggle is considered as futile and hopeless, and the conflict is solved by an identification with the aggressor leading to a more or less complete submission to his superior powers. The customary theoretical description is: introjection of the aggressive and powerful objects, or splitting off parts of the introjected objects as the internal persecutors, and so on. In quite simple language this means that ever after we seem to help bring about our own humiliation, to work for a victory of our adversaries, perhaps even to the extent of enjoying the strains and pains caused by our own frustration and misery; that is, by their satisfaction. In funfairs apparently this state of affairs is turned into the opposite. We are allowed to be aggressive and destructive; the environment does not show any resistance; in fact, offers itself as a willing target; moreover, it definitely rewards us the more highly the more destructive we are able to be.

To describe this hitherto unstudied object relationship with our present terminology would be anything but easy, though not impossible; for instance, by straining a point and using the idea of projective identification. This would explain why the individual should feel that his environment agrees with, and even rewards, his aggressiveness directed against it; but it would not help us to understand the fact that the environment really does so, and still less why this queer object relationship is mutually satisfactory both to the individual and his environment.¹ On the other hand, if we use my idea of primary love the theoretical description of this object relationship causes no difficulty. Primary love is a relationship in which only one partner may have demands and claims; the other partner (or partners, i.e. the whole world) must have no interests, no wishes, no demands, of his or her own. There is, and must be, a complete harmony, i.e. a complete identity of wishes and satisfactions. The English saying, 'What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander', is here literally and absolutely true; the environment must be in complete harmony with the demands and enjoyments of the individual. The rejoicing of the environment on being destroyed by the individual, to the extent of offering rewards for its own destruction—as happens in funfairs—is one more fairly strong argument for the theory of primary love. Looking at it from this angle, funfairs offer possibilities of limited regression to this early phase of human relationship.

However, it must be added that there are important differences among individuals in the extent to which they are able to regress towards enjoying these kinds of pleasures. Some revel in these possibilities, get excited, slightly mad, while others are not interested, are even bored or disgusted. There are also others who timidly try but are inhibited and can never be any good at it, and still others who are contemptuous, apprehensive, or even frightened. Later we shall have to go into the dynamics of these various attitudes in more detail.

Still greater theoretical difficulties are encountered when we try to describe the amusements of the third group, which include the traditional swings, roundabouts, switchbacks, and their more and more complicated and ingenious modern forms. All the amusements in this group are connected with giddiness and vertigo; that is to say, with a situation in which a particular form of anxiety is aroused and borne. The form of this anxiety can be described as loss of balance, of stability, of the firm contact with the safe earth, and so on. Some people react instinctively, almost reflex-like, to this kind of anxiety by clutching at something firm, or, in still greater anxiety, by pressing their whole body against a firm and safe object. While normally the planting of the feet firmly on the ground gives them enough security, in 'giddy' situations this does not seem to be sufficient.

In all amusements and pleasures of this kind three characteristic attitudes are observable: (a) some amount of conscious fear, or at least an awareness of real external danger; (b) a voluntary and intentional exposing of oneself to this external danger and to the fear aroused by it; (c) while having the more or less confident hope that the fear can be tolerated and mastered, the danger will pass, and that one will be able to return unharmed to safety. This mixture of fear, pleasure, and confident hope in face of an external danger is what constitutes the fundamental elements of all thrills.

Let us briefly examine in what way other thrills resemble those offered in funfairs. Some are connected with high speed, as in all kinds of racing, horse-riding and jumping, motor racing, skating, ski-ing, tobogganing, sailing, flying, etc. Others are connected with exposed situations, like various forms of jumping and diving, rock climbing, gliding, taming wild animals, travelling into unknown lands, etc. Lastly, there is a group of thrills which are connected with unfamiliar or even completely new forms of satisfaction, either in the form of a new object or of an unfamiliar method of pleasure. The obvious new object is a virgin, and it is amazing how many thrills claim this adjective. One speaks of virgin land, a virgin peak, or a virginal route to a peak, virgin realms of speed, and so on. On the whole, any new sexual partner is a thrill, especially if he or she belongs to another race, colour, or creed. The new forms of pleasure include among others: new food, new clothes, new customs, up to new forms of 'perverse' sexual activities. In all these phenomena we find the same three fundamental factors described above: the objective external danger giving rise to fear, the voluntary and intentional exposure of oneself to it, and the confident hope that all will turn out well in the end.

Another group of thrills, much more primitive and general but equally important, is made up of some forms of children's games. The majority of them are based on our three fundamental factors. A typical example may suffice: Tom Tiddler's Ground. It is highly significant that in practically all games of this kind the security is called either 'house' or 'home'. This holds good not only for English but for all the languages known to me. All these games consist (a) of an external danger, represented by the catcher, the seeker, the chaser, and (b) of the other players leaving the zone of security, the 'home', accepting exposure to danger more or less voluntarily, (c) in the confident hope that somehow or other they will reach security again. There are innumerable games of this kind, like blind man's buff, hide and seek, tig, rounders, musical chairs, oranges and lemons, to quote a few, and not forgetting cricket, where on the whole runs may be scored only by leaving the safe zone.

Lastly, we have the professionals, who are paid for their skill which causes thrills to the spectators and possibly also to themselves. They are called acrobats, and are a very old and venerable profession, represented already on classical Greek vases and possibly even on frescoes found at Knossos and dating back to 1600 B.C. Their performances include amazingly varied forms, some of them of great antiquity, seen and admired already in the Roman circuses, among them tightrope walkers (funambuli), bareback riders (desultores), tumblers, jugglers, and possibly also contortionists. In more modern times they have mastered the fixed and the flying trapeze, the unsupported ladder, and so on. The thrills caused in the spectators increase with the distance of the acrobat from the safe earth and the precariousness of his attachment to some firm structure—which in the last analysis means also the earth. We shall have to return presently to this observation.

The psychology of these thrills has not been studied to any extent, and it is no wonder therefore that our terminology, based mainly on early 'oral' experiences, fails rather sadly when we attempt to describe these phenomena. In order to be able to discuss them I propose to coin two new terms. Greek scholars among my readers will know that 'acrobat' means literally 'he who walks on his toes', i.e. away from the safe earth. Taking this word as my model, I have coined 'philobat' to describe one who enjoys such thrills; from which one can easily form the adjective 'philobatic' to describe the pleasures and activities, and the abstract noun 'philobatism' to describe the whole field. We need another term to describe the apparent opposite of a philobat, one who cannot stand swings and switchbacks, who prefers to clutch at something firm when his security is in danger. For this I propose 'ocnophil', derived from the Greek verb ὸϰνέω, meaning 'to shrink, to hesitate, to cling, to hang back'. From this word we get the adjective 'ocnophilic' and the abstract noun 'ocnophilia'.¹

¹ In America the same kind of enjoyment is offered in 'Amusement Parks'.

¹ The condition that the environment, although damaged or even destroyed, is satisfied, differentiates this primitive relationship from another group of cases in which destructiveness is also rewarded, as, e.g., in the case of bravery in war. There at least one part of the environment—the enemy—is not pleased at all and tries hard to defend itself.

¹ I wish to express my gratitude to David Eichholz, Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol, who, greatly amused by my efforts to find suitable words for my ideas, helped me to devise these two terms.

II
Philobatism and Ocnophilia

THE introduction of new words calls for justification; their usefulness has to be proved. I propose to do this in two ways. I intend to show, first, that by using these two terms we can discuss certain human experiences more easily than without them; and, secondly, that in this way we can better understand these experiences and their dynamism. Let us therefore briefly survey what we already know about thrills; that is, philobatism and ocnophilia. This will help us at the same time to clear our way for the next step, since this survey will bring us to the point which our theory of these phenomena has reached.

Let us start with the children's games. As I have said, the zone of security is always called either 'home' or 'house', which points to its being a symbol for the safe mother. We have seen also that all thrills entail the leaving and rejoining of security. The pleasures experienced in either of these two phases—that is, either when staying in security or when leaving it in order to return to it—are very primitive, selfevident, and apparently in no need of explanation—although it must be stated that not every adult can enjoy them equally. True, some adults seem to be at ease only when in the state of stable security; others, on the contrary, enjoy leaving it in search of adventures and thrills and show signs of boredom and irritation if they have to forgo them for any length of time. Somehow, however, correctly or incorrectly, one gets the impression that ocnophilia might be the older and more primitive of the two attitudes. Later we shall have to examine more closely how far this impression is misleading.

One's relation to security—that is to say, one's behaviour in the state of security—appears prima facie to be simple, uncomplicated, practically unstructured, whereas one's relation to the intervening state, while enjoying the thrill, seems very complicated and involved indeed. A readily available parallel is the way the infant clings to his mother before leaving her, before walking away. This is undoubtedly true, but it should not be forgotten that this difference might be caused merely by the unequal rate of maturation of the various systems of motility and not necessarily by those of the mind; that is to say, because the nerve centres and musculature of the mouth and arms involved in clinging mature earlier than those concerned with walking and maintaining equilibrium. It would be wise to be cautious in our inference from these observations about the existence of certain mental attitudes; as, for instance, taking the nipple and sucking it appears in a full-time baby at about the same time as pushing the nipple out of the mouth and turning the head away. It is even possible that the pushing out might be the earlier function, as premature babies often have to be taught to take the nipple, although they can already swallow faultlessly. What we can say at this moment is that the relative chronology of philobatism and ocnophilia is uncertain, although it is certain that they are both very primitive. We shall return to the problem of chronology in Chapter IX.

Nevertheless, ocnophilia impresses us as the more spontaneous, almost reflex-like attitude, whereas one cannot state with certainty where philobatism really belongs. In addition the appearance of ocnophilic tendencies in seemingly purely philobatic situations suggests a kind of regressive trend and, conversely, a more primitive nature on the part of ocnophilia. To quote a few examples: the tight-rope walker holds a pole in his hands, the lion tamer a whip, the conductor of an orchestra a baton, and so on. Moreover, the car driver has to learn not to grip the wheel and the skier not to press his sticks; similarly a boxer, a weight-lifter, an oarsman, in fact every athlete, has to be taught not to tense up his neck and jaw muscles when making a supreme effort. As already mentioned, the performance of an acrobat is valued more highly if he does not use his hands; if he hangs from the trapeze by his feet or his teeth, lets go the handlebars of the bicycle, drops the reins of his horse when standing on its back, enters the lion's cage without a whip, or, to come down to the level of ordinary human beings, rides on the roundabouts standing up, without leaning on or holding on to anything. A traditional trick, often used by acrobats, which always increases the excitement, the thrill, is to get rid of and throw away parts of their equipment in an already exposed situation or before entering into a still more exposed one. We may even add that the transitional objects of young children and toddlers described recently by Winnicott¹ are nearly always clutched, pressed, or cuddled; furthermore, all artists must have something in their hands: a brush, a chisel and mallet, a baton, a bow, a drawing pencil and ruler, a pen, and so on. In general, even statues tend to hold something fast, no matter whether they represent soldiers, scientists, artists, politici...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE: THRILLS
• PART TWO: REGRESSIONS
• PART THREE: APPENDIX
• PART FOUR: CONCLUSIONS
• Index