Backward into Creation: Adaptive regression in the plays of Aristophanes

Illustration by Sarah-Jane Crowson

In artmaking, according to Ernst Kris, the ego simultaneously surrenders and controls. In 1936, Kris described this phenomenon with the phrase “regression in the service of the ego.” He added the related psychoanalytic concept of “adaptive regression” in his seminal 1952 paper, “The Psychology of Caricature.” Adaptive regression means a movement backward—backward from adult reality to childhood make-believe, backward from maturity in the final stage of psychosexual development, the genital, to earlier stages. The difference from nonartistic regression is that the artist who surrenders to this primal material is still enough in control to generate work in a particular medium. The ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes are illuminated by just such an understanding of adaptive regression. Drawing on Kris's concept and Freudian theories in general, I will suggest that, while often juvenile or even downright infantile, Aristophanic comedy regularly portrays, or even enacts, temporal regression (a return to earlier stages of psychosexual development) and conceptual regression (a return to instability of identity and reality).

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.

With its emphasis on eating, bodily functions, and sex, Aristophanic comedy regularly enacts regression to preadult stages of psychosexual development, in particular, the oral, anal, and phallic. Let's start with the oral. Like many of Aristophanes's plays, Birds ends with a feast. Portrayed as a glutton in comedy, Heracles surrenders his whole purpose as a negotiator in order to enjoy barbecued fowl. All id in Freudian terms, he is, according to his fellow ambassador Poseidon, “an idiotic pig.” The irony is that Heracles's all-consuming urge, instead of causing further conflict, precipitates the happy and festive denouement of the play—peace between the gods and the birds is concluded, and the wedding of the main character Peisthetaerus to Princess, an allegorical goddess of prosperity, is celebrated. So in Aristophanic comedy preadult psychosexual stages like the oral can, in addition to being humorous, solve the problems which adults, with their less primal and more intellectual demands, have created.

Before we turn to the anal and phallic stages, I should explain that, in passages that focus on defecation and male genitalia, I sometimes used “baby words” in my translations, partly as an expression of the regression enacted in the plays and partly for aesthetic reasons. For example, I at times rendered words for feces as “poop” instead of “shit.” Constant obscenity in art, like constant violence, becomes tedious and ineffective. If one says “shit” over and

over again, the word loses its shock value. Furthermore, the word “poop” evokes regression to the anal stage better than the more adult word “shit.” As he laments his constipation in a soliloquy, an old man named Blepyrus, for example, expresses childlike wonder at the way food is converted into excrement:

In order to relieve himself, he conflates the anus and the vagina in a prayer to Eileithuia, the goddess of childbirth:

Whether one finds the metaphor offensive or humorous because offensive, its focus on orifices places it squarely in the Freudian scheme of psychosexual development.

In the final stage, the genital, teens have learned, according to Freud, to balance their most basic urges against the need to conform to the demands of reality and social norms. By shamelessly revealing his masturbation instead of concealing it out of a respect for social norms, Strepsiades in Clouds enacts regression from the genital to the phallic stage of development. Endowed with a leather strap-on as part of his costume, he is tossing and turning on a bed under a blanket when Socrates, the headmaster of a school called “The Thinkery,” enters. Strepsiades has been tasked with coming up with intellectual ideas, so Socrates asks:

Have you had any good ideas?

Strepsaides has not only received a failing grade from Socrates but failed the test of the genital stage by refusing to suppress his urge in a social situation. I used the juvenile word “boner” here to suggest that Strepsiades is acting like a teenager who has regressed to the phallic stage by publicly playing with himself. Throughout this play Aristophanes reduces intellectual concepts to bodily functions and libido, and he here equates intellectual contemplation with masturbation.

As with all drama, ancient Greek comedy inherently presents a regression from a mature stage, with its acceptance of reality, into make-believe. The audience is expected to accept that, in the world of the play, male actors are females and the Theater of Dionysus in Athens is any number of faraway settings, even the utopian and impossible Cloudcuckooland. A night out at the theater demands that one pretend, and this acceptance of what is not so is itself a childlike act.

For all of the anxiety over masculinity in ancient Athens, its comedy required male actors to breach boundaries of gender identity and dress and act like females. The twenty-four-member chorus consisted of ephebes (young men) from a particular deme (district) of Athens. These young men played, as a collective, characters other than what they were—animals and insects in such plays as Frogs and Wasps and women in such plays as Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly. Furthermore, since all the actors were male, all the other named female characters were males in drag as well. This practice compelled the actors to explore another gender identity and exaggerate its stereotypical behaviors well enough to present a travesty of them. Given the number of male actors dressed as women, the play Lysistrata, for example, was one big “Drag Queen Story Hour.” It is remarkable that Athenian males, who were even more “macho” (concerned with appearing masculine in public) than American males, established and loved theatrical-religious festivals in which promising young men, selected by the civic-political

head the archon, were required to dress in drag and act like females. In myth, the hyper-masculine hero Heracles both dresses in drag and does what was traditionally considered women's work, such as weaving, for a year. The implication is that acting like a female was a rite of passage to adulthood for the young men and to immortality for Heracles. It was as if one had to experience being the opposite of what he would become in order to fully understand his future role.

In its original performance, Women of the Assembly featured double drag—male actors playing female characters who dressed in drag as males. The concept of double drag reintroduces self-awareness and fun to gender identification: being a man is just the humdrum thing a man does each day; playing a woman who is acting like a man, however, makes the whole performance fresh and enlightening. It's the difference between “I'm a man” and “I'm a man!” Though lacking, of course, male primary sexual characteristics, the female characters in Women of the Assembly have concerned themselves with secondary ones—body and facial hair. One says, “I've grown my armpit hair out/bushier than a thicket,” and they all tie on fake beards — a hallmark of male adulthood in ancient Greece. They also rehearse what one might call tertiary sexual characteristics — walking and talking like men. Since respectable females traditionally have fairer skin than males in ancient Greece (because they are rarely allowed outside), one says she has been tanning so as to pass more credibly as a man. As with Blepyrus's conflation of the anus and vagina earlier in the play, we here find the conflation of the vagina and mouth when the lead female character Praxagora, while enjoining the women to stay in their male roles, compares female pubic hair to the bushy beard of a prominent Athenian named Phormisius:

It would be just glorious if some woman clambered over the men and hitched her clothes up and exposed her—Phormisius!

It seems that focus on orifices is not just Freudian but Aristophanic as well. As a connoisseur of Aristophanic comedy and a man who has on occasion dressed and acted like a woman, I can attest that dressing in drag is not only fun but mind-expanding.

In his seminal article on adaptive regression that I referred to at the outset, Kris proposed that creative individuals can gain access to primary process thought and utilize it in adaptive ways. By switching back and forth between primitive ideation and remote associations, on the one hand, and critical evaluative thinking, on the other, they creatively integrate illogical thoughts and associations. In just this way, Aristophanes playfully, impossibly, fuses avian and human characteristics in his comedy Birds, in which a new utopian city, Cloudcuckooland, demonstrates, by contrast, all that is undesirable about real-world Athens toward the end of fifth century BCE. The playwright simultaneously surrenders to childlike play and controls this play in such a way that the whole comedy is a polemic. In a 1981 book called Cognition and Consciousness, Martindale explains that, “because primary process cognition is associative, it makes the discovery of new combinations of mental elements more likely.” Birds is rife with such combinations. The many avian species have become civilized (according to human standards) and speak human language. Humans, in turn, can become birds. It is, perhaps, only through this conceptual regression to make-believe that one can conceive of a utopia like Cloudcuckooland where all primitive urges are satisfied and all adult frustrations eliminated.

As an artist, I spend my workdays unlearning and surrendering. Indeed, artistic creativity over the millennia has had far less to do with pushing forward toward innovation (as technology and medicine do) and far more to do with going backward to the primal urges and thought-processes we have all experienced.

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He translated Aristophanes: Four Plays (Liveright, 2021), and his poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, and POETRY.