A psychoanalyst in search of the logic of the absurd

During a therapy session, one of my patients, perplexed by the furor over the U.S. election, tells me: “I’ve never been interested in politics, let alone U.S. politics. So why can’t I take my eyes off that antiquated cartoon character [Trump]?” To which he himself replies: “Because it’s absurd… a farce.” Another patient, middle-aged and with a successful career, comes to see me, tormented by an order that states: “If you don’t pray two hours before going to work, you’ll be fired.” And he asks: “If it’s absurd, why do I do it?” The more vivid his obsessive experience, the more compelling the compulsion.

We live in an age of bewilderment that brings with it a panoply of absurdities. Not just in regard to world politics. We are attracted to the absurdity of absurdity itself. But what constitutes the feeling of absurdity? And what mechanisms allow such a meaningless psychological manifestation to be so important for the psychic life of the human being?

Travis Proulx of Cardiff University, who has been studying psychological responses to absurdity, explains: “When we talk about absurdity, we’re talking about violations of our mental models — it’s a topic that existentialist philosophers have devoted a lot of their thinking to. Death is the most powerful threat — it violates all models — but in everyday life, we constantly face violations of our expectations of how the world works. The more our patterns are challenged, the more anxious we become and the more action-oriented we become to get away from what threatens our meaning maintenance models.” The person caught up in absurdity tends to see patterns where there are none, becoming more prone to conspiracy theories or religious causality.

The need for order is satisfied, it seems, regardless of the veracity of the evidence. “Threats to our meaning maintenance frameworks, whatever their source, motivate us to look for meaning elsewhere,” Proulx emphasizes. In the initial phase of anxiety, the state of arousal can be measured by pupil dilation. “You are motivated and you see the signals in the noise,” says Proulx, whose work frequently uses pupillometry to quantify physiological arousal in the face of “the feeling of absurdity.” What’s more, brain imaging studies of people asked to confront absurd dilemmas record, he says, significant levels of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, “which is involved in attention and emotion regulation, inhibitory control, error monitoring, and motivation.”

But not all uncertainties are equal, and we should not expect them to have the same effects. Traumatic events violate deep meaning structures, become existential enigmas, and force us to readjust our expectations of reality. “Post-traumatic stress disorder leads to chronic vigilance; any small anomaly triggers overwhelming anxiety that is maladaptive.” However, within a reasonable spectrum of absurdity, activation of the signal-in-noise monitoring pattern can be beneficial.

To test this, Proulx and his colleague Steven H. Heine of the University of British Columbia asked one group of students to read a modified version of Franz Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor that included a series of absurd and somewhat disturbing events. A second group read a different version, in which the plot did make sense. They were then asked to complete a grammar-learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in strings of letters, then asked to copy the individual letter strings and mark those that followed a similar pattern.

Those who read the nonsensical version identified a greater number of strings of letters. “Clearly, they were motivated to find a structure,” the researchers conclude, “but more significantly, they were actually more accurate than those who read the coherent version. They actually learned the pattern better than the other participants.” The test is a measure of implicit learning, or knowledge acquired without conscious awareness. We are so motivated to get rid of the feeling of strangeness that we unconsciously look for meaning and coherence elsewhere, channeling the feeling into some other project.

Wherever we look, absurdity is everywhere. Every night we have an appointment with absurdity in our dreams; during the day, we stumble upon it in our Freudian slips; what would a joke be without its absurd core? Simple common sense cannot take us very far into the dimension of the unconscious, which expresses itself in a very absurd way.

The absurd incites us to configure alternative frames of meaning in order to maintain the integrity of the self and our environment. In the words of the poet Pierre Reverdy: “Poetic reality emerges from the bringing together of two distant realities.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition