Comedy and Tragedy in Life and Therapy

It can seem heartless to talk about bringing a comedic sensibility to the treatment of something sad or traumatic. But the term comedy has technical meanings apart from the seriousness of the subject matter. Also, the adage, “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” helps us see our way through the sentimentality of insisting on treating sad events as tragedies.

The tragic view of some psychoanalytic therapy is the one thing I don’t like about it. The idea is that something happened a long time ago that informs one’s character and leads inevitably to sad outcomes, such as repeating the past, reckoning with our misdeeds, and dying. It evokes the “you poor dear” kind of therapist who commiserates and condoles but forgets that the point of therapy is to change the way the patient behaves. The counterpoint, to me, is CBT’s comedic view: “How did a likable, intelligent person like you make such a mess of life?”

The supposedly-sympathetic, condoling framing of suffering as a tragedy induces people to embrace hopelessness, victimhood, and defeatism.

Let’s examine a few definitions of comedy and tragedy. One emphasizes how they end, with comedies ending happily, but a more sophisticated view is that comedies tend to end as they started. Comedy tends to be circular and tragedy linear. A man who ruins his life by outsmarting everyone to the point where he can derive no satisfaction from earthly pleasures is tragic. Condemning the same man (Sisyphus) to an eternity at a simple task that he cannot solve is comedic. One forgets about whatever made him choose his own cleverness over his humanity, and instead, one sees him pushing a boulder up a hill repeatedly only to have it get away from him. Sisyphus while alive is tragic like Juliet, both in love with their own cleverness at the cost of their demise. Sisyphus in the underworld is Laurel and Hardy, piano movers in The Music Box.

CBT seems comedic in its search for happy endings. Psychoanalytic therapy looks tragic in its focus on aversive emotions and unwanted aspects of the self, but it is actually comedic. It focuses on recurrent patterns rather than singular events. The sessions end on time and, ideally, occur at the same time and place every week. This lends a comedic quality of circularity to the relationship, as it starts and ends the same way at every encounter.

Finally, when it’s over, it’s over. Perhaps nothing in therapy more powerfully connotes the sensibility that the things that have happened to you are things that happened to you and don’t need to be what defines you. The finality of termination makes the therapy itself something that happened to you rather than something that defines you.

The author and playwright Janna Goodwin said (or remembered) that comedy reveals the personal backstage, celebrating one’s foolishness, predictability, bad behavior, and unwanted experiences to a laughing rather than scorning audience. Think of comedians reporting on their bathroom and sexual behavior, but also of Michael Scott’s narcissism and the neuroses of the various Friends. That is the essence of psychoanalytic therapy, except the therapist is more like a professional audience member—a fellow comedian—who rarely laughs but instead says, “I get it.”

Tragedy, according to Goodwin, is about trying to hide the stigmas that comedy glories in revealing. Hamlet doesn’t want people to know he covets the crown, Lear that he covets admiration, Othello that he covets inclusion. CBT is all too often satisfied with formulaic and superficial versions of what is hidden, such as thinking that one is “worthless” or “unlovable” rather than specifying the details. This allows the truth about oneself to remain hidden while only sounding as if it had been revealed, and the conspiracy to hide the details (in some CBT therapies) is tragic. The psychoanalytic goal of digging up stigmatizing events and reducing their sting in an environment of welcoming curiosity makes it essentially comedic.

Author Arthur Koestler has something to say about this as well. He says that creativity (which I am using to include new solutions to life problems) involves “bisociation.” In comedian George Carlin’s terms, “If you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.” In therapy, what is bisociated is often the contrast between one’s narrative of self and one’s actual experiences. Koestler says that creativity in the arts takes on a comedic or a tragic bent depending on the emotional stance from which it was observed, comedy drawing generally on the assertive emotions and tragedy on the receptive ones. Comedy cues you to distance yourself from its characters while tragedy tries to draw you into identifying with them. In this respect, relational therapy is tragicomic in the sense that the therapist gets drawn into the patient’s world while maintaining the distancing maneuvers of managing the frame.

Philosopher William Hazlitt wrote (in 1819), “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” Resolution of the difference between what is and what might have been is at the heart of psychotherapy. The idea that there will be a resolution is essentially comedic. Koestler wrote that the essence of the comedic sensibility is the recognition that one was fooled, and this can be a tonic to anyone who thought they were protected from tragic losses. Psychotherapy is, among other things, an exposition on ways the patient was fooled by expectations developed from misleading experiences. CBT treats being fooled as a riddle; psychoanalytic therapy treats it as an enormously clever, longstanding, high-maintenance practical joke.

Psychoanalysis Essential Reads

Translating Psychoanalytic Terms Into Everyday Life: Containment

Recasting Psychoanalysis in Existential Terms

A version of this post also appears in The Colorado Psychologist.