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The philosopher Thomas Nagel and the surrealist painter René Magritte both concentrated on coming to terms with the experience of the "absurd." Nagel, discussing
it in terms of "cognitive dissonance," noted its pervasive and often distressing existence in the lives of all human beings. He believed that our sense of the absurd results from our consciousness, from "our ability to transcend ourselves in thought." Magritte causes us to experience the absurd by portraying the dissonance on canvas.
Psychoanalysts have also addressed the absurd. Freud associated the experience of absurdity with several phenomena, including dreams, jokes, obsessions, and phobias, as well as with the sense of the "uncanny." He described the experience in terms of intrapsychic conflict. Charles Brenner stressed the necessity of the coexistence of conflicting points of view in his theory of compromise formation. Martha Wolfenstein examined children's humor, and discovered that children's jokes are used for developmental mastery. Children miss or avoid cognitive dissonance, which would, for them, create or intensify intrapsychic conflict. Rather, children react directly to the latent conflict, and what they enjoy are the magical solutions provided by jokes to real situations. An example of the "moron" jokes is given, where the child can master the identification with the moron through repetitively telling the joke to others. Another example is Alice in Wonderland, which adults appreciate because of its dissonance, but children often find scary and not funny.
The author ponders why adults appreciate such things as jokes with cognitive dissonance or the paintings of Magritte. Should not successful analysis reduce our sense of the absurd? The author concludes that, on the contrary, successful interpretation is liberating because, by decreasing intrapsychic dissonance, it expands one's ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, doing away with discordance, as in the