BACKWARD INTO CREATION
Adaptive regression in the plays of Aristophanes
BY AARON POOCHIGIAN
Illustration by Sarah-Jane Crowson
In artmaking, according to Ernst Kris, the ego simultaneously surrenders and controls. In 1936, Kris described this phenomenon with the phrase “regression in the service of the ego.” He added the related psychoanalytic concept of “adaptive regression” in his seminal 1952 paper, “The Psychology of Caricature.” Adaptive regression means a movement backward—backward from adult reality to childhood make-believe, backward from maturity in the final stage of psychosexual development, the genital, to earlier stages. The difference from nonartistic regression is that the artist who surrenders to this primal material is still enough in control to generate work in a particular medium. The ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes are illuminated by just such an understanding of adaptive regression. Drawing on Kris’s concept and Freudian theories in general, I will suggest that, while often juvenile or even downright infantile, Aristophanic comedy regularly portrays, or even enacts, temporal regression (a return to earlier stages of psychosexual development) and conceptual regression (a return to instability of identity and reality).
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.
—Charles Baudelaire
With its emphasis on eating, bodily functions, and sex, Aristophanic comedy regularly enacts regression to preadult stages of psychosexual development, in particular, the oral, anal, and phallic. Let’s start with the oral. Like many of Aristophanes’s plays, Birds ends with a feast. Portrayed as a glutton in comedy, Heracles surrenders his whole purpose as a negotiator in order to enjoy barbecued fowl. All id in Freudian terms, he is, according to his fellow ambassador Poseidon, “an idiotic pig.” The irony is that Heracles’s all-consuming urge, instead of causing further conflict, precipitates the happy and festive denouement of the play—peace between the gods and the birds is concluded, and the wedding of the main character Peisthetaerus to Princess, an allegorical goddess of prosperity, is celebrated. So in Aristophanic comedy preadult psychosexual stages like the oral can, in addition to being humorous, solve the problems which adults, with their less primal and more intellectual demands, have created.
Before we turn to the anal and phallic stages, I should explain that, in passages that focus on defecation and male genitalia, I sometimes used “baby words” in my translations, partly as an expression of the regression enacted in the plays and partly for aesthetic reasons. For example, I at times rendered words for feces as “poop” instead of “shit.” Constant obscenity in art, like constant violence, becomes tedious and ineffective. If one says “shit” over and over again, the word loses its shock value. Furthermore, the word “poop” evokes regression to the anal stage better than the more adult word “shit.” As he laments his constipation in a soliloquy, an old man named Blepyrus, for example, expresses childlike wonder at the way food is converted into excrement:
What am I going to do? This present pressure isn’t my only problem. When I eat again, will there be room for still more poop? Already Mr. Nowhere-Else-to-Go has got my door sealed tight.
In order to relieve himself, he conflates the anus and the vagina in a prayer to Eileithuia, the goddess of childbirth:
Goddess of Childbirth, don’t you leave me helpless when I am crammed and bolted.
Whether one finds the metaphor offensive or humorous because offensive, its focus on orifices places it squarely in the Freudian scheme of psychosexual development.
In the final stage, the genital, teens have learned, according to Freud, to balance their most basic urges against the need to conform to the demands of reality and social norms. By shamelessly revealing his masturbation instead of concealing it out of a respect for social norms, Strepsiades in Clouds enacts regression from the genital to the phallic stage of development. Endowed with a leather strap-on as part of his costume, he is tossing and turning on a bed under a blanket when Socrates, the headmaster of a school called “The Thinkery,” enters. Strepsiades has been tasked with coming up with intellectual ideas, so Socrates asks:
The Birds of Aristophanes, Robinson Planche, 1846.
Have you had any good ideas?
Strepsiades:
No,
By Zeus, no good ideas.
Socrates:
Nothing at all.
Strepsiades: (throwing off the blanket)
Nothing except this boner in my hand.
The Birds at University of Cambridge, Henry Gillard Glindoni, 1833.
It would be
just glorious if some woman clambered over
the men and hitched her clothes up and exposed her—
Phormisius!
It seems that focus on orifices is not just Freudian but Aristophanic as well. As a connoisseur of Aristophanic comedy and a man who has on occasion dressed and acted like a woman, I can attest that dressing in drag is not only fun but mind-expanding.
In his seminal article on adaptive regression that I referred to at the outset, Kris proposed that creative individuals can gain access to primary process thought and utilize it in adaptive ways. By switching back and forth between primitive ideation and remote associations, on the one hand, and critical evaluative thinking, on the other, they creatively integrate illogical thoughts and associations. In just this way, Aristophanes playfully, impossibly, fuses avian and human characteristics in his comedy Birds, in which a new utopian city, Cloudcuckooland, demonstrates, by contrast, all that is undesirable about real-world Athens toward the end of fifth century BCE. The playwright simultaneously surrenders to childlike play and controls this play in such a way that the whole comedy is a polemic. In a 1981 book called Cognition and Consciousness, Martindale explains that, “because primary process cognition is associative, it makes the discovery of new combinations of mental elements more likely.” Birds is rife with such combinations. The many avian species have become civilized (according to human standards) and speak human language. Humans, in turn, can become birds. It is, perhaps, only through this conceptual regression to make-believe that one can conceive of a utopia like Cloudcuckooland where all primitive urges are satisfied and all adult frustrations eliminated.
As an artist, I spend my workdays unlearning and surrendering. Indeed, artistic creativity over the millennia has had far less to do with pushing forward toward innovation (as technology and medicine do) and far more to do with going backward to the primal urges and thought-processes we have all experienced. ■
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He translated Aristophanes: Four Plays (Liveright, 2021), and his poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, and POETRY.
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023