Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be born,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
HT: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2005)
Recent Comments