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In his paper, Negative Reactions to Christmas,1 Jule Eisenbud expresses the opinion that:
The type of celebration that characterizes a festival has only a formal relationship to the generic meaning of the holiday. While legend and ritual lend the trappings, individuals react according to the peculiarities of their temperaments. Some merely indulge in immoderate eating and drinking; others look forward to unbridling their ordinarily monotonous sexual lives; exhibitionistic persons use a holiday as a pretext for jumping onto the stage; still others, according to their lights.
He seems to believe that festivals, through their general occasioning of emotion, only release reactions specific to the individual which have little or nothing in common with the historical and archaic motivations of the festival in question. Christmas, for example, is solely characterized by a general relaxation of the demands of the superego. Psychologically, it is 'the season when governments grant amnesties and penal institutions distribute pardons. It is the season when the solid citizen becomes liquid and "the devil is raised". When it is all over repression resumes and the air is disinfected with good resolutions.' He tries to demonstrate with the cases of two women that their lack of pleasure in Christmas is based on the frustration of an infantile wish for a penis, which Santa Claus did not fulfil. He provides no explanation as to why we expect Santa Claus to fulfil these wishes, nor of the essential nature of these wishes, because he does not believe that the normal and pathological reactions experienced at Christmas are specifically determined by the festival itself.
Simple and easily accessible observations, not of patients