NUAR ALSADIR

Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst, poet and writer based in New York City. Her poetry collection Fourth Person Singular (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize. Animal Joy (Fitzcarraldo / Graywolf, 2022), her first prose work, is a free-associative essay on laughter, spontaneous expression and the elusive idea of feeling alive, which takes in clown school, erotic knowledge, canned laughter, Abu Ghraib, Trump, dance and adjectives.

Interview by Louis RogersPortrait by Joseph Robert Krauss

Louis Rogers What can we learn by listening to laughter?
Nuar Alsadir Scientists divide laughter into two categories: Duchenne and non-Duchenne. Duchenne laughter is a full-bodied, spontaneous outburst that overtakes you. You don’t know why you’re laughing; you emit surprising sounds; you might even wet yourself; it’s out of control. Most laughter – about 90% – is non-Duchenne, or social laughter. This laughter is metacommunicative: it communicates something outside of language. It cues people to understand what’s happening at an interpersonal level. For example, it might communicate, “I’m happy to see you.” If laughter accompanies a hostile remark, then you’re cued to override your brain’s reception of hostility with a social signal that the remark is friendly. So what non-Duchenne laughter communicates doesn’t always have to do with humour. It’s not genuine laughter; it evolved when human beings became able to imitate facial expressions and breathing. It’s a form of manipulation, and not all manipulation is bad. Sometimes we try to help people feel more comfortable if they’re nervous, and that can be manipulation for good. Understanding laughter means, first of all, recognising whether it’s a spontaneous outburst or a communicative signal. Listening to laughter would mean, I think, perceiving what kind of laughter you’re hearing in the moment as opposed to receiving the social signal that laughter cues. Then moving into whatever comes next.

LR We are used to witnessing public debates sparked by particular, offensive jokes. What is at issue in these discussions, at least in part, is whether the joke is funny. Can that be a productive discussion to have? Or are we heading for a dead end as soon as we start trying to persuade someone that something is funny (or not)?
NA Henri Bergson said that our laughter is always the laughter of a group. The emotion of a crowd is emotion from the unconscious, for the most part, so we don’t always choose to become part of one of these groups. Another question to ask about these situations might be: what is the point of a joke that hurts people? Why is it being told in the first place, and what kind of pleasure are people getting from it? Freud describes “smut” as a kind of humour in which three parties are involved: the person using sexually aggressive or hostile speech; the target of that speech; and then a third person who is a bystander. In this triangle, pleasure is produced in the third-party bystander – the audience – and their pleasure then pleasures the person who is using the speech. If you’re talking about a joke that is offensive, I think the question would be whether you can identify these three parties. Is there a target of the joke who is being used as an object to pleasure a third-party bystander? The question, as I see it, is not whether or not the joke is funny, or even appropriate, but whether it’s OK to transform someone from a subject, an individual with their own consciousness and rights, into an object. What is the joker getting out of that, and what are they getting out of giving pleasure to a third-party bystander in this way? They would have to know, at some level, that something illicit was going on or they wouldn’t need to triangulate. To assess the ethics of a joke, it’s helpful to step back and look not only at the joke’s content but its structure.

LR Your new book Animal Joy is about subjects that are unspeakable in various ways, things like laughter, erotic desire and feeling “real”, which are either resistant to being encoded in language or which we don’t want to articulate. As a result you’re sometimes wary of language, of leaving ideas “shut up in prose”. You are also attuned closely to words, reading them literally to find hidden meanings, or noting telling slips. Where is the balance in that approach to language, and how does it figure in psychoanalytic practice?
NA It’s hard to know where the balance should be or how it should be formulated outside of a particular situation. It’s not only case by case, but it has to do with the person speaking and what’s happening interpersonally as you’re listening. One of the interesting things about psychoanalysis is what we call metapsychology: Freud created a metapsychology in which he talked about how psychoanalysis should be conducted. But once that is put into practice with living people, it will necessarily be altered. To go into a situation with a sense of how it should be approached is already to stop listening as acutely as you need to if you are going to be attuned to what’s happening. Wilfred Bion, who was Samuel Beckett’s analyst, writes that a psychoanalyst should enter every session without memory, desire or understanding. You’re not supposed to enter with memory of what’s going on in the case or where you think what’s happening fits into a larger history. You’re not supposed to have desire, which would be to want a certain outcome for the analysand or to want them to speak or develop in a certain way. When analysts quote this, they usually cut off “understanding”, because the understanding part is difficult to grasp. What does it mean to go into a session without understanding? The way I take it, Bion means you’re not supposed to take in any understanding that you had before you entered the session but to treat the session as a living moment that creates a new reality to be attended to, as opposed to fitting it into a structure that pre-existed it.

LR Does humour have a place in this practice? What would it mean for an analyst to find something funny?
NA Perhaps this is an example of a situation in which understanding what kind of laughter you’re dealing with is important. If it were non-Duchenne laughter, it would probably be problematic because it would involve the analyst trying to manipulate the relationship through a nonverbal signal. That laughter might be communicating sarcasm or asserting a power position in relation to the analysand, or even signaling alignment, political or otherwise. If it were Duchenne, it would be different. Freud, in his notes to the Rat Man case, writes that he burst out laughing at something the Rat Man said. This would be a moment of what we call countertransference. Transference is when the analysand transfers the expectations they have about relationships developed from their past onto the analyst: the analyst becomes placed, for example, in the figure of the mother or the father or a lover. Countertransference is when that process happens in reverse, when something is triggered in the unconscious of the analyst that then gets transferred onto the analysand. It’s not objectively good or bad – the analyst is, after all, a human being – but it needs to be analysed outside a session. Freud bursts out laughing when the Rat Man says that someone in Freud’s family was a famous murderer. When Freud laughs, he is signalling that the Rat Man’s accusation is not true. Perhaps the trigger for his countertransferential response is that he did have criminal activity in his family history, having to do with counterfeiting. He may have had a moment of countertransference where a bad feeling came up and was evacuated through his laughter, in a bodily outburst like a metaphoric sneeze.

Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022

LR You write about recapturing our animal life, which is something like what D.W. Winnicott called the True Self. Certain notions of this animal life seem to exist before and outside of all social life. How can we understand the idea of a self that is pre-social?
NA In Winnicott’s model, the True Self is not a socialised thing. It exists in the infant before the infant has language or any other communicative means. The infant will express spontaneous gestures, and if the mother accepts them as they’re given, that will encourage the infant to continue to express them. But if the mother corrects them, for example, if the infant says “Maah” and the mother says “Mama”, and the infant says “Mama” and gets the reward of love, then the infant will learn to give the mother what she wants in order to get a reward. That’s the birth of the False Self, which is the socialised self. We all need a False Self to survive, and also to protect the True Self. You don’t want that True Self on the surface where it can be attacked or defiled or eroded. Sometimes we can become so good at playing the game that our False Self becomes so strong and so automatic that the True Self recedes and we can no longer access it. One of the goals of the book, I would say, if I were able to control it at all, would be for readers to get something out of these ideas for themselves, to figure out how to increase their access to their True Selves, to feel more alive and tuned into their desires than the desires of others. I don’t mean to imply that it’s a “self-help” book, but on the other hand I think that all the books that have been meaningful in my life – from authors like Nietzsche to Tsvetaeva to Fanon – have functioned for me as self-help books.

LR In your poetry you have used techniques that help you access your unconscious and explored different forms of address that echo the dialogue psychoanalysis is built around. How do you go about writing prose?
NA I wrote this book as I would write poetry. I was going for a sense of meaning accrued by both following my associations and tying back and circling over the same points from different perspectives. In the end, I hoped there would be resonances and meanings that would cohere inside the reader that weren’t necessarily my own. I didn’t want to lose the small or meaningful moments by making them subordinate to some packaged central idea. The section breaks are marked by Labanotation, a system of choreographic symbols. I wanted to indicate movement of mind by grafting it onto the body, as in dance. The book is, in that sense, choreographed. You can understand it by foregrounding its logic and you can also take it in as you would a dance performance. I do have one rule of thumb when I write prose, which is that I would like my daughters to be able to understand it. That’s been the case since they were little. I feel that if I mix in a philosophical or psychoanalytic idea, I should explain it in a way that someone who has not yet undergone higher education can understand.

LR Your daughters are a big part of Animal Joy. They provoke and interrupt and reframe your ideas throughout it. How did they affect the evolution of the project and your thinking more generally?
NA They’re in there because they force me to keep things real and accessible. They’re uninhibited in ways that I admire and I strive towards. I learn from them. When you’re parenting, you can sometimes feel like you’re losing time or not being productive. In darker moments it can feel like you’re wasting your life. At a certain point I tried to look at those moments differently, to see moments of my life as uncoded. There’s no reason why doing something very mundane is any less meaningful than doing something that is seen as worthy. Approaching my life in that way, seeing each moment as equally full of possibilities, was a shift in perspective. That’s also what caused them to enter. When my first book of poems was going to be published, I was reading over the galleys and saw that my younger daughter, who was quite young at that point, had found them and just seen them as paper. On the title page, it said More Shadow Than Bird, and she had written beneath that, “by Nuar Alsadir. How I love her”. Then she had gone through and made marks on the pages all the way through. There was a text that overlaid my text. I think of Animal Joy as multiple books on top of one another in this way. In total, it’s the book I wrote while trying to write a book about laughter. ◉

CONTINUE READING: