I.
Beginning with pleasure, I shall first examine a typical case studied by several physiologists, who have not furnished any, to me, satisfactory explanation. I mean the special state which has been called “the luxury of pity” (Spencer), pleasure in pain (Bouillier), and which it would be more accurate to call “the pleasure of pain.” It consists in being pleased with one’s own suffering and tasting it like a pleasure.
This disposition of the mind is not, as one might think, peculiar to blasé persons and to epochs of refined civilisation; it seems inherent in humanity the moment it emerges from barbarism. Bouillier[[42]] has quoted from the ancient writers passages referring to it, not only in Lucretius, Seneca, and other moralists, but in the Homeric poems, which reflect a very primitive civilisation, yet in which a man “rejoices in his tears.” Parallel passages might have been found in the Bible, and also, I suppose, in the epics of ancient India. We have not, therefore, to deal with a rare phenomenon, though it becomes more frequent as we advance in civilisation.
A few examples will be of greater value than any opinions I could cite. They may be found of all sorts—pleasure in physical pain, and pleasure in moral pain. Certain patients find intense enjoyment in irritating their sores. Mantegazza[[43]] says: “I knew an old man who acknowledged to me that he found an extraordinary pleasure, and one which seemed to him equal to any other, in scratching the inflamed surfaces surrounding a senile sore in his leg from which he had suffered for some years.”
A celebrated man of the Renaissance, Cardan, says in his autobiography that “he could not do without suffering, and when this happened to him, he felt such an impulse arise in him, that every other pain seemed a relief.” When in this state, he was in the habit of torturing his own body till forced to shed tears by the pain.[[44]] I might enumerate a long series of these pleasures of physical pain. Of the pleasures of moral pain I will give but one example: melancholy in the ordinary, non-medical sense-the melancholy of lovers, poets, artists, etc. This state may be considered as typical of the deliberate enjoyment of sadness. Any one may be sad, but melancholy is not to be attained by every one. I may mention also, in passing, the pleasures of ugliness in æsthetics, and the taste for sanguinary spectacles and tortures which we shall have to consider in another place.
If we leave the facts and come to the explanations proposed, we shall find that they are not numerous. Bouillier (op. cit.) seems to adopt the opinion of a Cartesian, who said, “If the soul, in all movements of the passions, even the most painful, is in some measure tickled by a secret feeling of pleasure, if it takes pleasure in pain, and does not wish to be consoled, it is because of a consciousness that the state in which it finds itself is the state of heart and mind best suited to its situation.” I fail to understand this pretended explanation. I prefer that of Hamilton, who places the principal cause in the increased activity imparted to our whole being by the sense of our own sufferings. This, at least, is logical, since pleasure is connected with its habitual correlative—an increase of activity. Spencer has examined the problem at greater length.[[45]] "Here I will draw attention only to another egoistic sentiment, and I do this because of its mysterious nature. It is a pleasurably painful sentiment, of which it is difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called ‘the luxury of grief.’... It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth, as he estimates it, and the treatment he has received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast.... There is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.... That this explanation is the true one I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand."
This explanation seems to me only a partial one, and not applicable to all cases. In my opinion, no efforts of this kind can be successful, because the authors remain on the ground of normal psychology. This class of facts ought to be treated by the pathological method. It may be said that this is only the substitution of one word for another. By no means, as we shall see by the result.
The mistake lies in attacking, in the first instance, phenomena of too delicate a nature, and considering them as isolated facts. We must proceed, not by synthesis or analysis, but by the cumulative method—i.e., we must establish a chain of facts, of which the last links, being of overwhelming importance, shall throw light on the first. I indicate the principal stages of this gradation thus—Æsthetic melancholy (transitory and intermittent); spleen, melancholia (in the medical sense);[[46]] then, advancing a step further, suicidal tendencies, and finally, suicide. This last term makes all the others comprehensible. The first stages are only embryonic, abortive, or modified forms of the tendency to self-destruction, of the desire which makes it seem agreeable. The weaker forms—checked in an immense majority of cases—approximate more or less to destruction, and can only be explained if compared with the extreme case.
The evolutionists have stated the hypothesis that there must have existed certain animals so constituted that, in them, pleasure was connected with destructive acts, pain with useful ones, and that, as every animal seeks pleasure and shuns pain, they must have perished in virtue of their very constitution, since they sought the destructive and shunned the preservative influences. There is nothing chimerical in this supposition, for we see men find pleasure in acts which, as they very well know, will speedily result in their deaths. A being thus constituted is abnormal, illogical; he contains within himself a contradiction of which he will perish.
But, one may say, if pain and hurtful acts on the one hand, pleasure and serviceable acts on the other, form indissoluble pairs, of such a kind that the painful state in consciousness is the equivalent of destructive acts in the organism, and inversely, we should here have an interversion—pleasure would express disorganisation; pain, reorganisation. This hypothesis is not a very probable one, and scarcely seems necessary. If we admit, as has been said in the preceding chapter, that there always exist two simultaneous and opposite processes whose difference is all that is perceptible to the consciousness, it is sufficient for one of the processes to be accelerated or the other retarded, in an abnormal manner, in order to change the difference in favour of one or the other. No doubt the final result contradicts the rule, since in the above cases the surplus which ought to be negative (pain) is positive (pleasure). But this is a new proof that we are confronted with a deviation, an anomaly, a pathological case to be treated as such.
I have taken by itself and studied a typical case; it now remains, not to enumerate, but to classify pathological pleasures in order to show their frequency. Taking as a guide the excellent definition of Mantegazza, “Morbid pleasure is that which is either the cause or the effect of an evil,” I divide them into three classes.
1. Semi-pathological pleasures, which form the transition from the healthy to the frankly morbid. These require an excessive or prolonged expenditure of vital energy. We know that the pleasures of taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch, muscular exercise, the sexual relations, produce fatigue and exhaustion, or even suddenly become painful. The pleasures of affection, of self-love, of possession, when they become passions—that is to say, when they increase in intensity and stability—cease to be pure pleasures; a painful element is added to them. This phenomenon is natural and logical, since every increase in activity entails losses, and consequently conditions of pain. This class is scarcely morbid, since pain here succeeds pleasure. This is not the case with the other two, in which pleasure rises from the midst of destruction, and dominates the consciousness.
2. Pleasures destructive of the individual. I do not stop to discuss certain anomalies of taste and smell which will be described elsewhere; but the pleasures due to intoxication and narcotics are so widespread that they seem inherent in humanity. At all times, in all places, even in the savage state, man has found artificial means of living—if only for a moment—in an enchanted world. He has himself created this pleasure for his own destruction. But there are still clearer cases—of tendencies not acquired or invented—when pleasure makes and dominates the process of disorganisation. Thus, during a certain period of the general paralysis of the insane, the patient believes himself to possess the supreme degree of strength, health, riches, and power; satisfaction and happiness are expressed in his whole bearing. Thus in certain forms of acute mania, on one side (which we shall pass over for the present) it shows itself in anger; on another, in exuberant spirits, abounding joy—a feeling of energy and vigour. Some patients say, after their recovery, that they never felt so happy as during their illness (Krafft-Ebing). We may also mention the case of consumptive patients, many of whom are never so rich in hopes or so fertile in projects as when at the point of death. Finally, we have the sense of well-being (“euphoria”) of the dying. It has been attempted to explain this by analgesia, as if the suppression of pain were identical with the appearance of joy. Féré, who has examined the question in his Pathologie des Emotions,[[47]] concludes that this exaltation is due to momentary but positive conditions of the cerebral circulation.
Must we admit that, in these cases, by an inconceivable derogation from natural determinism, pleasure becomes the translation into consciousness of a deep and incurable disorganisation? There is no need of this. It is more rational to admit that this pleasure is here, as elsewhere, connected with its natural cause, a superabundance of vital activity. Every pathological pleasure is accompanied by excitability; but the latter is not a normal activity, or the fever-patient and the neuropath would enjoy an excess of health. In reality, we are confronted with a complex case; on the one hand, a perpetual and enormous loss, which goes on rapidly, without becoming perceptible to the consciousness; on the other, a superficial excitement, which is momentary and conscious. The anomaly is in this psychic disproportion, or rather in the short-sighted consciousness, which cannot pass its narrow limits and penetrate into the region of the unconscious.
3. Destructive pleasures of a social character, which are connected, not with the suffering of the individual himself, but with that of others. Such is the pleasure felt in killing and seeing killed—in sanguinary spectacles, bull-fights, fights between animals, and, in a much feebler degree, in hearing or reading tales of bloodshed. These pleasures can be explained; they denote the satisfaction of tendencies to violence and destruction, which, strong or weak, conscious or unconscious, exist in all men. They may be studied under the heading of the pathology of tendencies, which I shall treat later on; let me only remark in passing that these tendencies involve a certain display of energy, which is one of the conditions of active pleasure.
One question in conclusion. Can pleasure, and joy in particular, be the cause of a grave catastrophe, such as madness or death? Some alienists—Bucknill, Tuke, Guislain, etc.—quote cases of madness which they attribute to sudden joy, such as an unforeseen inheritance, or success in obtaining a long-wished-for situation. The same thesis has been maintained in the case of death[[48]] occurring suddenly, or after syncope. Griesinger maintains that it is extremely rare—if it ever happens—for excessive joy by itself to produce madness. Others absolutely deny the fact.[[49]] It is certain that joy is seldom seen figuring in any enumeration of the causes of madness. Joy, as a state of consciousness, could not have such effects. The catastrophe can only be explained by sudden and violent organic troubles, which cannot have this effect unless there already exists a predisposition. It is not joy which maddens or kills, but the shock received by a being in an abnormal state. It would be more correct to say that an event which, in the generality of men, ought to cause joy, here produces a peculiar pathological state ending in madness or death.