A few years ago, a rather self indulgent patient of mine collapsed into a fashionable psychiatric hospital from which the staff kept me regularly posted on his progress. An eager young therapist called me each week from the hospital recounting fancied or forgotten traumas from the patient's childhood, and how much the staff had cried over each incident and each therapy session. The real crises in this man's life-his child's crippling ski accident, his mistress's demands, and his wife's divorce threats-were pushed aside by the young man's burgeoning self-pity.
The stresses in life that fuel emotional crisis come from all around: Some arise from the human condition, some fall from the skies. Our greatest traumas may even be unspoken, leaving us silent and shamed, thus increasing our shame. I thought the young man needed a touch of the snake pit before he got his massage.
As a supervisor, I'm surprised at what therapists see as their function. The tone of psychotherapy can feel grimly tragic and end in tears, or it can be joyful and fun and end in hugs and laughter. Laughter need not be insulting; it may be liberating and connecting. It is the gasp of life, the deep breath that demarcates the realization that, after traumas have been survived, the crisis du jour is now an opportunity for celebration rather than a left turn into victimhood and "Poor sweet baby, you've been abused so whatever you do is not your fault."
As I recycled my old patient's sniffling self-pity over the universal insults of life, I thought back to my favorite short story, A SHOCKING ACCIDENT by Graham Greene. In Greene's story, the motherless 10-year-old Jerome is at a British boarding school while his adored father travels the world as a diplomat. Jerome is called into the headmaster's office to be told that his father has been killed in a shocking street accident in Naples, where an overgrown pig living on a balcony falls on the passing father and breaks the man's neck. While the Headmaster stifles his laughter at the shock and absurdity of a pig falling out of the sky, Jerome shows no emotion at all, but finally asks "What happened to the pig?"
The boy then dedicates his life to finding a tone and attitude that will let him tell the story of his father's death without eliciting laughter from the listener.
Finally the determinedly joyless Jerome meets a girl who does not laugh at the tale of the pig falling from the sky, but asks instead, "What happened to the poor pig?" To which Jerome responded by first falling in love and then answering, sensibly: "They almost certainly had it for dinner." Jerome smiled a slight smile as he fell in love.
In 1982, the story was filmed as a comic tale with the supercilious and overly refined adolescent Rupert Everett as Jerome. Jerome finds not just his soul mate but also the connection between his seemingly unique life tragedy and the universality of the human condition. The fewer the items in our life that are too scary, too painful, too humiliating to deal with, the less connected we end up feeling to the life around us.
As therapists, we may have to cry with people before they can begin to laugh with us and to see their experience as real and universal. The more things we can laugh about, the more alive we become: The more things we can laugh about together, the more connected we become. Humor stops somewhere short of unadulterated cruelty. ("Otherwise, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?")
Therapy, to be therapeutic, not only relieves pain, it teaches the skills of happiness, which may require a comic perspective, an awareness of having survived. The last laugh is not expressed until human comedy and human tragedy come together, and comedy ultimately prevails.
