ADLER PATED PT. 3

Not that I've mentioned it before, but I've been working on a book explaining my take on the superhero idiom. What I'm printing here now is a section that I wrote for a first draft, only to decide that it no longer fit the general plan any more. This excerpt may repeat some of the points from the ADLER PATED series, beginning here, but that's because it wasn't written for this blog.

______________

As I noted in Chapter 1, Aristotle’s assertion that all fiction includes an agon or conflict has become a commonplace principle in literary criticism. Aristotle says nothing about any type of conflict being inherently better than another form. However, combative forms of conflict—those in which a dispute was resolved through two or more characters coming to violent blows—became less commonplace in literature as poetic epics gave way to realistic fiction. Violence still occurred in realistic fiction, but it usually lacked archetypal dimensions. There was no sense of a monumental contest when Robinson Crusoe simply used a rifle to shoot down a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. In some metamundane works of the post-Renaissance period, such as Gulliver’s Travels, conflict tended toward absurd resolutions. When Lilliput suffers an attack by an enemy fleet, gigantic Gulliver discourages the invasion by urinating on the attackers. Not exactly in line with the Marquise of Queensbury rules.

After I watched an action-movie with a friend, I asked him afterward what if any meaning he assigned to the film’s climactic fight-scene. Why was it pleasurable? His answer was one that most readers will find familiar: audiences enjoy watching characters engage in life-and-death struggles because audience members can’t enjoy such visceral pleasures in real life without consequences. Punch out your mean boss in real life; you get fired and/or go to jail.

Between the years 1907 and 1911, psychologist Alfred Adler formulated the concept of “compensation.” Having studied the ways in which the human body compensated for “innate anomalies of organs”—for instance, weakness of sight—Adler extended his observations into the realm of psychology. Adler argued that from childhood on, human beings inevitably found themselves challenged by their physical and social experiences. For instance, Adler, a second child himself, sometimes discussed how sibling rivalries could evolve when a child felt that his sibling was receiving all the parental affection, thus leading to feelings of inferiority and emotional deprivation that could affect the child even in later life

Though Adler is not as well known today as his contemporaries Freud and Jung, his compensation theory has become axiomatic in modern culture, particularly when dealing with questions like “why people like fictional stories.” The usual response goes something like, “People lead boring lives, so they like to compensate by reading about fictional characters who lead exciting lives.”

There’s undoubtedly a partial truth in this. Even some fictional works, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, focus upon characters unable to separate reality from fantasy. However, Alfred Adler was a little more nuanced than the routine reading of compensation theory. The psychologist distinguished between positive and negative forms of compensation, one being an activity that strengthens the individual, while the other activity has a weakening effect. For instance, in his lecture “Outcomes of Overcompensation,” he points out that paranoiacs are so obsessed with seeing their perceived truths that they manifest “hallucinatory fits.” However, an artist can channel his desire for better sight into art. Adler cites the example of Johann Schiller, a playwright known to have suffered from weak eyesight. Rather than seeking to see better than he could in real life, Schiller channeled his desire for superlative sight into fiction, by creating a hero who could see well enough to shoot an apple off his son’s head: the semi-legendary William Tell.

The “negative compensation” explanation for fictional pleasure is often applied to combative forms of fiction, but it would seem to apply across the board to everything. Do you read stories about romantic love? You don’t have enough love in real life. Do you read stories about faraway places? You’re fed up with your current location. Do you read stories about mad kings and melancholy Danes? You must have a deep-seated envy for the privileges of the monarchical system. By its nature, this concept of compensation accentuates the negative to such an extent that anyone’s taste can be reduced to a simple equation: “You only like X in order to compensate for Y.” Indeed, critics have so often put forth the negative compensation argument against things they don’t like—be it cozy mysteries or big-budget superhero movies—that even the fans of those types of fiction have been known to utter the same arguments, along the lines of “I know it’s junk, but I like it.”

What would criticism look like if it used Alfred Adler’s full proposition, rather than just the half that makes the critics feel good about themselves? Then critics would have to agree that readers of any type of fiction are capable of approaching that genre or form in a positive, self-strengthening manner or in a negative, self-weakening manner. If this is the case, then there must be ways in which combative stories exemplify positive compensation, rather than simply being substitutes for experiences that the audience cannot access.

I said in Chapter 2 that fantasy elements in fiction had the power to open the nearly limitless powers of the imagination. Fictional combat stimulates the imagination as well, though it’s oriented largely on a specific theme: what I’ve called ‘the archetypal battle of good and evil.” In real life, outbreaks of violence are often stupid, pointless, and chaotic. Certain sports-games, like wrestling and football, pit athletes against one another in violent activities, though the activities are dictated by a set of rules. Some fans become so invested in these games that they have been known to riot— usually because their team has lost, though on occasion they even do so when their team wins. But at the core, the society as a whole doesn’t believe that the “villain” in the wrestling-ring is really evil, or that the home-team’s victory makes the community’s life any better.

In fiction, fantasies of a struggle between good and evil can be fully explored, the better to understand one’s ideas of good and evil when they’ve been embodied in the forms of heroes and villains. The fact that the combative form of fiction has been able to prosper over centuries, despite the opposition of so-called “higher culture,” speaks to its pertinacity.

PRIEST, PRAYER AND PREDESTINATION

I've be re-reading Hyung Min-woo's manhwa PRIEST to determine whether or not it meets my criteria for a mythcomic. I haven't yet finished, but my general impression is that the series is too episodic to qualify. Neverthless, it does display some interesting myth-motifs. The story takes place in an alternate-world version of Earth, in which a Catholic priest named Ivan Isaacs loses his faith when his personal life is destroyed by one of God's archangels. In order to obtain vengeance, Isaacs gives up his soul to the demon Belial, who transforms the ex-priest into an undead scourge.

Now, one interesting thing about the above exchange is that it takes place in a fantasy-world where the reality of angels and demons is constantly attested. God, creator of both supernatural races and of mankind, is by implication just as real, though as in many such fantasies the creator-god has removed himself from the battle for reasons unknown.

In the above confrontation, Isaacs, who is no longer a believer in God's mercy, quotes one of the Christian Psalms to his demonic opponent. The demon derides the quote and asks Isaacs if the ex-priest really believes that such 'drivel is the word of God." Isaacs replies, "Not really. But I take consolation in the strength of men's words."

Of course, this reverses the intention behind Christian scripture, or, for that matter, the majority of religious teachings. Whether holy sayings take the form of direct instructions or poetic meditations, they are supposed to derive their authority from being handed down from a deity or deities. A more overtly anti-religions author, such as Philip Pullman, would probably amplify Isaacs' pro-humanity stance into an overt theme. However, the author of PRIEST doesn't seem harp on the evils of godhood often enough for me to think this exchange is anything more than a minor motif; something along the lines of an aside to show Isaac's alienated character.

Now, though I'm not a Christian, I used to be, over forty years ago, so I'm aware of some of the dynamics that inform this particular realm of worship. On this forum-thread, I responded to a poster who asserted that as he understood things, prayer could not influence the Christian god. I responded:

There is no single belief about the efficacy of prayer in the varied world of Judeo-Christian sects-- to say nothing of other religions that resort to praying--so you've oversimplified the question. Some worshipers do believe that in predestination, that everything that's ever happened or going to happen is fixed. For those believers, prayer, like deeds, can make no difference to God's verdict. Other believers favor a more open-ended view of destiny, in which it's possible for a god to intervene if he so chooses. For such believers, there's no guarantee that prayer will work but as the saying goes, "it can't hurt."

Now, while I don't believe in the specific Christian God, the concept of predestination suggests some fascinating philosophical avenues.

I recently argued to one acquaintance, a Catholic believer, that the idea of predesintation conflicts with the doctrine of free choice. In my mind, if God created the universe and knows ahead of time everything that's going to happen until the Last Days, then there's absolutely no point to the process of creation. My friend, not unexpectedly, resorted to the old chestnut that God's creations can't know His Mind and that human beings cannot know what God finds significant.

To my mind, this is a circular argument. The Bible, ostensibly the Word of God as transmitted to mortals, God is constantly described as evincing human-like emotions or sentiments. Additionally, his actions are frequently described in terms of means and ends: "God did X to achieve Y." Believers frequently have no problem in describing God's actions as representing a higher form of reason, and they de-emphasize any implications of a God of capricious and unreasonable moods (like the version in the Book of Job, who decides to ruin Job's life in order to test his mettle).

Admittedly, the Christian Bible does not cite a definitive reason as to why God chose to create all of Existence, which is one reason that narratives of predestination can exist alongside those of free choice. I frankly do not think that the God of the Old Testament is meant to be as omniscient as Christian representations tend to portray him, but even if there was absolute agreement between all texts, the conflict would still be implicit.

The only possible motivation for a god to imbue mortal beings with "free choice" is if Existence is open-ended; if God does not know exactly what mortals are going to do with that choice. If a  believer should insist on God's omniscience within such a scenario, I might imagine a situation where God blocked his own potential vision of a predestined future, in order to let himself be surprised by and engaged with the choices human beings made.

Now, in contrast to the world of PRIEST, the human beings of the "real world" cannot see constant evidence of God's reality: they can only deduce that reality through perceived signs and symbols. To persons of a materialist / positivist cast, signs and symbols have no reality in themselves. However, even though I do not pray to the Christian God, and can consider a reality in which none of mankind's deities are objectively real, I can view the activity of prayer as sometimes possessing a "strength," even if the prayers are hurled into an unresponsive void, with no validating response from the deity being addressed.

Of course, anything that can be a strength can also be a weakness, depending on how it is done, and for what reasons, as I've explored in last year's essay ADLER PATED PT. 2.

ADDENDUM 5-4-18: For some reason I took it for granted that PRIEST boasted a completed arc, but I recently learned that it simply tailed off when the artist went on to other things. This alone insures that it cannot qualify as a mythcomic.

MORE COMMENT PRESERVATION

From a CBR thread this time:

_____________________
Well, I'd automatically put aside comparisons between entertainment and addictive substances. You can put alcohol and tobacco through the proper chemical analyses, and indicate pretty much what makes human beings want them. Thus far, no one's managed to do that with fiction,

The comparison between entertainment and domestic violence is wrong in a different way, Say that it's been statistically demonstrated that nine-tenths of all kids who witness domestic violence grow up to perpetrate domestic violence. But the kids of abusive families are not CHOOSING to see their parents batter one another; it's utterly outside their control. In contrast, patronizing violent entertainment is a CHOICE. The patrons may or may not be messed up by their personal circumstances, and they may or may not be employing what Adler called "negative compensation" to escape his problems. But we don't yet have proof that nine-tenths of, say, all horror-gorehounds become serial killers, perpetrators of road rage, or whatever.


I tend to think that entertainment has been violent since the dawn of humankind-- albeit with oscillations in tune with cultural priorities-- because fictional violence does serve as a stopgap. The contrasting view-- that violence ought to be rigidly controlled-- was once the province of pundits like Frederic Wertham and his fellow-traveler Gershon Legman. Given the effects of wild anti-comics claims, I might have thought that modern comics critics would shun that sort of extremism. Instead, I've seen both Wertham and Legman being represented as sober scholars rather than extremist cranks-- and I guess that too has much to do with current antipathies toward the very idea of representing violence, no matter how unreal it may be.


_____

A follow-up:

I'm not following. The anti-comics movement of the time may or may not have comprised a majority of the populace, but they had power because they appealed to a common belief among the majority, to the extent that that majority thought about comic books at all. That majority believed that comic books were for children, and so the majority of people did not oppose the minority that demanded some form of censorship. So, in effect, the vocal minority got their way by appealing to societal customs-- though the end game of Wertham was to get comics put off limits to children.

I can't see why you'd say Wertham lost. True, he didn't get the scenario he expressly said he wanted: because he didn't trust comic-book publishers to clean up their own houses, he wanted the magazines off limit to kids under 15-- which, I think we'll all agree, would have killed the medium if that scenario had been implemented. But in effect, Wertham won, because he got the U.S. government to intervene at all, regardless of what they actually did about the perceived problem. The Senate probably didn't want to be bothered with monitoring comics on a regular basis, and so they were probably satisfied with horror and crime comics were for the most part exiled from newsstands.

Yes, the comics publishers may have had less than honorable motives for their clean-up campaign, but it can be argued-- and I think John Goldwater did say something to this effect-- why should the guys who were providing clean entertainment be penalized by the ones who were promoting sex and violence?  Even though I myself favor a pluralistic marketplace, where "clean" and "dirty" both have their place, I can empathize with the logic of this statement; obviously the statement of someone who didn't want his own corner of the business destroyed.

"Comics won?" Well, specific comics companies did not win. We'll never know if EC Comics would've lasted much longer, but in effect they were driven off the stands, and Max Gaines only saved his bacon by converting MAD into a B&W magazine format. There's only one way in which I can see that comics benefitted. Because the majority audience didn't have the animus toward superheroes that Wertham did, the "cleaner" comics-atmosphere paved the way for superheroes to become relatively more sophisticated in the Silver Age, ranging from Julie Schwartz's love of SF-themed gimmicks and Stan Lee's emphasis upon dramatic moments. But in between 1955 and 1960, a lot of people were hassled by the Code or lost their jobs because of it.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS, PART 2

I've never claimed to be an expert in the culture of archaic Greece, so I can only make tentative assertions based on fragmentary evidence. Within the halls of academia, there may be extensive analysis of the provenance of these terms, but the most thorough references I can find on the Net credit Hippocrates and related medical authors for using the two terms in my title-- "kenosis" and "plerosis"-- to mean "an inadequate diet" and "a more-than-adequate diet." It should surprise no one that these arcane technical terms originally connoted something having to do with the body, pertaining to whether it was too empty or too full-- both conditions that are opposed to one's diet being, as in the Goldilocks tale, "just right."

In Theodor Gaster's schema, there are two primary types of ritual action performed for both kenosis and plerosis, and each is focused on creating a distinct mood for the witnessing audience:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

These descriptions may or may not be adequate to describe all forms of archaic ritual activity, but they adapt well to the Fryean scheme of the four mythoi, which is my main concern here.

In Part 1 I asserted the logic of Alfred Adler's compensation theory, in which individuals might seek to compensate for various forms of conflict-- or what Hans Selye calls 'stress"-- in various ways. Some compensation strategies might prove negative in that they weakened the individual who pursued said strategies, while others would be positive, in that they made the individual stronger in some way.

I've been exploring, and will continue to explore, the ways in which fiction does or does not succeed in terms of the mythopoeic potentiality. This is a purely formal argument that does not impact directly on considerations of positive and negative compensation, though in Part 1 I stated that any such considerations would have to line up with my analysis that fiction had to be true to its greatest potential.

Because of my concept of *thematic escapism,* I've validated a lot of narratives that other critics have viewed as "fascist." I won't repeat my various arguments here, but one that I advanced in the March essay POSSE COMIC-TATUS might also be seen in terms of Adlerian compensation for the mythos of adventure. In that essay I wrote:

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

The exploits of Mike Hammer and Jack Bauer depend heavily on retributive violence, which means that they pertain to the mythos of adventure, which according to my adaptation of Gaster's four moods is primarily meant to be "invigorative" in its effect upon its audience.  But I would have to say that the Sadean air that Mickey Spillane brings to his righteous heroes is one that can "strengthen" the reader if said reader is able to read it as a wild fantasy, rather than mistaking it for a rendition of reality. In contrast, the "stupid and unimaginative" fantasy of the teleseries 24 lacks any of the qualities seen in the Spillane works. Both are "plerotic" works, in that the audience is supposed to feel invigorated by seeing evildoers defeated by the representatives of social good. But I label only Spillane as being a "good plerotic meal," while the contrasting examples are the sort of meals that will make one feel full, but in a way that weakens the body and the mind.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS

I haven't revisited Theodor Gaster's concept of "kenosis and plerosis" for some time, but it's occurred that some of my writings on the subject should be cross-compared with my observations on Adler's concept of "positive and negative compensation."

In this April essay, I cited what I found to be the closest Alfred Adler came, at least in a particular collection of his works, to giving examples of positive and negative compensation with respect to a particular bodily activity: that of sight:

As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances"... In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell.

I further observed that many elitist critics tended, unlike Adler, to view all such heroic fantasies as if they were negative compensations, as if they were automatically bad for being "escapes from reality." Since I have from the beginnings of this blog championed the idea that "fictions of escape" cannot be judged by the same terms as "fictions of realism,"  my verdict in this essay was that the only sin of a given fictional narrative can manifest is that of not living up to its potential as fiction:

This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

That said, aside from the very broad categories of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," I've also tried to map out how particular types of potential are oriented according to other criteria. Northrop Frye was my original guide in terms of viewing every fictional narrative as being principally dominated by a type of *mythos:* each of which owed something to Frye's elaboration of material from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray. I kept two of Frye's terms for these mythoi, "comedy" and "irony," and substituted modern terms "drama" and "adventure" for his terms "tragedy" and "romance." In my opinion the substituted terms were more in keeping with the actual affects that each mythos was meant to invoke, not to mention being more in tune with the formulations of Theodor Gaster. Gaster was certainly a primary force upon Frye's meditations in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though Frye, being more taken with the Aristotelian model provided by Murray, did not say much about Gaster's formulations.  I, in contrast, was particularly taken with the predominant "moods" that Gaster identified in his four types of myth-ritual narrative, and how these moods followed patterns of what the archaic Greeks called "kenosis" and "plerosis." Over the years I've endeavored to meld Frye's schema of the four mythoi with Gaster's schema of the four moods, as in this 2012 essay:

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

In the rituals Gaster describes, one must assume that both *kenosis* and *plerosis,* as societal rituals, were intended to have beneficial effects upon the society that practiced them.  The question of "escaping from potential as fiction" does not even come up in the context of religion.

However, because fiction is almost always presumed to be man-made, the question of whether or not it does its job well-- whether one uses terms like "positive and negative compensation," or "consummation and inconsummation"-- is one that recurs again and again.

In Part 2 I'll address some of the complexities involved in applying Adler's compensation argument to my adaptation of Gaster's concepts of plerotic and kenotic narratives.

COURAGE OVER FEAR

Suddenly, might is not an overwhelming force that exists outside the human subject, imposing fear as the lord does to the bondsman.  Might is something that can be summoned from within oneself, and is thus available to all human subjects who manifest the necessary will.  In addition, might is plural in nature: it has many faces, and in folktales and fairytales this many-sidedness often appears when a beleaguered viewpoint character receives supernatural help from some benign donor to "even the odds" against a powerful enemy.Thus, within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. -- THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PART 2.

Despite my liking for Nietzsche's concept of the *ubermensch*, I can't say that THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA is my favorite book on the subject. The philosopher's alter ego Zarathustra uses the concept to illustrate his ideal of "self-overcoming," a point which was resolutely ignored by later pundits in favor of the calumny that Nietzsche was a worshiper of violence, an anti-Semite, and a proto-Nazi. Though Nietzsche is clear enough on his core philosophy to anyone willing to read closely, it's not always pellucid as to what he's opposing. Zarathustra, speaking largely in a series of quasi-poetic, incantatory aphorisms, rails against all sorts of metaphorical evils that represented the mediocrity of European, calling them things like "the small men," "the Ultimate Man," "the fleas," and "the tarantulas."

Keeping this criticism in mind, in the section "On Science" Nietzsche is extremely clear when he advances a doctrine about "fear" and "courage." Since ZARATHUSTRA was not one of my favorite Nietzsche-reads, I think it's unlikely that this particular section influenced my "ethic of the combative," which as I've noted began from the seeds spread by Hegel and tended by Kojeve and Fukuyama. It's possible that Nietzsche, who's known to have read at least some Hegel (whom he did not overly like), may have absorbed some aspects of Hegel's "master-slave" dialectic. If so, he clarified some of the aspects of the dialectic that I found too obscure in Hegel.

"On Science" (translation here by Thomas Common) carries over from earlier sections in which Zarathustra has been convening with several disciples ("higher men," as Nietzsche calls them). One of the disciples, whom is described as "the conscientious man," advances a doctrine that defines humankind as the product of fear.

"Thou praisest me," replied the conscientious one, "in that thou
separatest me from thyself; very well! But, ye others, what do I see? Ye
still sit there, all of you, with lusting eyes--:

Ye free spirits, whither hath your freedom gone! Ye almost seem to me
to resemble those who have long looked at bad girls dancing naked: your
souls themselves dance!

In you, ye higher men, there must be more of that which the magician
calleth his evil spirit of magic and deceit:--we must indeed be
different.

And verily, we spake and thought long enough together ere Zarathustra
came home to his cave, for me not to be unaware that we ARE different.

We SEEK different things even here aloft, ye and I. For I seek more
SECURITY; on that account have I come to Zarathustra. For he is still
the most steadfast tower and will--

--To-day, when everything tottereth, when all the earth quaketh. Ye,
however, when I see what eyes ye make, it almost seemeth to me that ye
seek MORE INSECURITY,

--More horror, more danger, more earthquake. Ye long (it almost seemeth
so to me--forgive my presumption, ye higher men)--

--Ye long for the worst and dangerousest life, which frighteneth ME
most,--for the life of wild beasts, for forests, caves, steep mountains
and labyrinthine gorges.

And it is not those who lead OUT OF danger that please you best, but
those who lead you away from all paths, the misleaders. But if
such longing in you be ACTUAL, it seemeth to me nevertheless to be
IMPOSSIBLE.

For fear--that is man's original and fundamental feeling; through fear
everything is explained, original sin and original virtue. Through fear
there grew also MY virtue, that is to say: Science.

For fear of wild animals--that hath been longest fostered in
man, inclusive of the animal which he concealeth and feareth in
himself:--Zarathustra calleth it 'the beast inside.'

Such prolonged ancient fear, at last become subtle, spiritual and
intellectual--at present, me thinketh, it is called SCIENCE."--

Zarathustra counters with an argument that defines humanity in completely opposite terms.

Thus spake the conscientious one; but Zarathustra, who had just come
back into his cave and had heard and divined the last discourse, threw a
handful of roses to the conscientious one, and laughed on account of
his "truths." "Why!" he exclaimed, "what did I hear just now? Verily, it
seemeth to me, thou art a fool, or else I myself am one: and quietly and
quickly will I put thy 'truth' upside down.

For FEAR--is an exception with us. Courage, however, and adventure, and
delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted--COURAGE seemeth to me the
entire primitive history of man.

The wildest and most courageous animals hath he envied and robbed of all
their virtues: thus only did he become--man.

I'd love to know what scientists of his period Nietzsche believed to be guilty of defining humankind predominantly in terms of fear. Regardless, I believe that he was fundamentally correct. Adherents of empirical science validate the logic of "cause and effect" above all other principles, with "Occam's Razor" wagging its tail behind. Thus if the simplest explanation seems to be that humankind developed out of a need for security, to reduce fear's sway, then that would also be the correct explanation. It's surely no coincidence that H.P. Lovecraft, whose early flirtations with religion were dispelled by his conviction in the empirical sciences, penned the following:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Nietzsche was no less influenced than Lovecraft by the empirical science of his time. However, to judge from the words Nietzsche places in the mouth of his prophet, the philosopher believed that "courage" was "the entire primitive history of man"-- and that's keeping in mind that he's speaking of the "man" who is not even close to becoming the transcendent "superman:" the superman that, by his own attestation, Zarathustra believes in but has not actually seen. Whereas Lovecraft, who loved horror stories, defined humankind in terms of a negative reaction to "fear of the unknown," Nietzsche founds his vision of humanity in terms of "delight in the uncertain." I'll mention that these opposing viewpoints may also be glossed by Adler's notions of positive and negative compensation, on which I expatiated here.

I'll explore some of the ramifications of Nietzsche's viewpoint in future essays, but this essay is constructed largely as a resource for the viewpoint as such.

ADLER PATED PT. 2

I've often referenced Alfred Adler's theory of compensation on this blog, particularly in the series COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, beginning here. In the first of those essays, I loosely compared Adler's idea of "positive" and "negative" forms of compensation with the two forms of fictional "escape" Tolkien references in his essay ON FAIRY STORIES: in the sense of "escape from responsibility" and of "escape from a prison"-- implicitly as much a conceptual prison as a physical one. I considered expanding on that thought for a full essay, but felt that I needed to study Adler a bit more than I have since I wrote this 2009 essay.

I chose to read THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED ADLER, an overview of his work  edited by one Heinz Ansbacher, with copious excerpts from Adler and explanatory notes form Ansbacher. I did not find the main thing I was looking for: a single Adler essay in which he expatiated at length on his two forms of compensation. However, this idea definitely appears in his first work on the subject, 1907's "Organ Inferiority and Compensation." In this essay Adler sets the groundwork for his conviction that pathological psychological conditions may evolve out of a subject's perception of personal inferiority: "The inferior organ is not a pathological formation, although it represents the basic condition for pathology." As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances." Adler is certainly not saying that all paranoia evolves out of imperfect visual apparati-- he states that he does not offer his examples as "complete proof"-- but puts his examples forth as a tenable explanation for certain cases.

In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell. Current elitist criticism generally deems this form of compensation to be "negative." I mentioned in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, Jerry Siegel himself portrayed himself as the weakling who couldn't get lots of girls, and "compensated" by creating a mighty hero who easily attracted the female of the species.

What does it mean, that Adler deems this form of "artistic exorcism" as a positive response to perceived inferiority? Ansbacher notes that about the same time Adler broke away from Freud's circle and his doctrine, Adler took a palpable influence from the now-forgotten philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Ansbacher says of this author:

Fictions, according to Vaihinger, are ideas, including unconscious notions, which have no counterpart in reality, yet serve the useful function of enabling us to deal with [reality] better than we could otherwise.

Adler's former mentor Freud could not place any value on such fantasies, and he stands as one of the greatest influences upon the tendency of 20th-century intellectuals to devalue fantasy and/or "the pleasure principle" in favor of a supposed "reality principle."  Whereas Adler eventually wrote "I began to see clearly in every psychological phenomenon the striving for superiority" his old mentor wrote pessimistically that all should "abandon the belief that there is an instinct toward perfection at work in human beings." Most amusingly, Freud is so pessimistic that for him there could no future evolution along the lines of Nietzsche: "[The leader of the primal horde] at the very beginning of mankind was the Superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future,"

Now, so far as I can tell from the Ansbacher book, Adler did not write of "negative compensation" in terms of literature. As he was a psychologist, he was most concerned with the ways in which human beings became psychologically dysfunctional. I have no idea if he had any particular feelings about the popular fiction of his day, though if he validated Schiller's personal fantasy of a far-sighted archer-hero, I would posit that he might not be entirely hostile toward the pop-fiction "supermen" of the early 20th century. At worst he might consider them in the same terms as Vaihinger: useful fictions that help one deal with reality.

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

For a pluralist like myself, the matter is more complex. Though I prefer works with symbolic complexity to works without it, I can't state outright that the latter are "inferior organs" next to the latter. Even a story that works as nothing but a good "thrill-ride" fulfills, for me, Tolkien's definition of fantasy as an "escape from a prison," i.e., "positive compensation."

So is there a principle that works across the spectrum of "art-fiction" and "popular fiction" that parallels both Adler's "negative compensation" and Tolkien's "escape from responsibility" (which, to be sure, is not something Tolkien himself endorses; he's simply explaining the position of his opponents). The closest I can come is to repeat what I said in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.  Both types of fiction are fundamentally defined by the activity of "play," though "art-fiction" is play turned to the purpose of "work," while "pop fiction" is play for play's sake. In that essay I said that I found that DESPAIR, a work of "thematic realism," was inferior to Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST because the former had too little "play," while THE CLANSMAN, a work of "thematic escapism," was inferior to GONE WITH THE WIND because the former showed too little "work." This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

QUICK COMPENSATION COMPARISON

Though I've only recently chanced across a reference to the pioneering work of endocrinologist Hans Selye-- a Nobel-Prize winner credited with formulating the 20th century concept of "stress"-- even a quick Wikipedia reference points out a useful comparison with the compensation theory of Alfred Adler, first examined on this blog here.

Here's a Wikiquote I've cited before re: positive and negative compensation-- a concept I've found useful in refuting critics like Julian Darius:

Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.
 

In 1975 Hans Selye pioneered a roughly similar "positive/negative" classification of glandular excitement states.  Again quoting from Wiki's essay on stress:

Selye published in 1975 a model dividing stress into eustress and distress.^[16] Where stress enhances function (physical or mental, such as through strength training or challenging work), it may be considered eustress. Persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation, deemed distress, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal (depression) behavior.
 

Neither psychologist Adler nor biologist Selye applied their insights to literary criticism.  On occasion lit-critics have looked at fiction through Adler's lens, though Adlerian examinations are far outnumbered by those following the lead of Sigmund Freud, the past master of explaining psychology purely through acts of "negative compensation."

While Selye's biological research in itself probably would not lend itself to the analysis of literary constructs, its central conceit-- that of "stress" having both negative and positive connotations-- proves useful to a literary hermeneutics based in notions of conflict and will, as my own is.  The notions of "eustress" and "distress" may also prove an interesting gloss on Theodor Gaster's division of the emotional tones evoked by ritualized endeavors into tones of "plerosis" or of "kenosis."

OUTCAST OF THE COMICS-ISLANDS PT. 2

The title of this 2-part essay, obviously indebted to the Conrad novel, should put a particular complexion on the word "outcast."  In common usage the word implies a person who has been cast out by others.  But Conrad's outcasts-- Lord Jim, Kurtz, Nostromo-- effectively cast themselves from the mainstream of life.  In the world of America comics fans are more used to the image of protagonists being outcasts through no fault of their own, as with most of the X-Men. 

So to the extent "outcast" applies to me, I'm of the Conradian type, having veered off the well-beaten path followed by most of the comics-intelligentsia.  I'm currently planning a series of essays which "crosses over" the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer with the academic analyses of myth-ritualist Theodor Gaster.  In contrast, most of the intelligentsia stick with those well-traveled titans of tedium, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. 

This is rather ironic for those critics who have gathered a reputation for telling superhero fans to be more venturesome; to read other things than superheroes.  I can't object to the advice, but one wonders how seriously one should take it, when a writer like Chicken Colin browbeats readers to read an allegedly subversive LGBT superhero title, but in another essay sneers at Friedrich Nietzsche as a "19th century syphilitic sexist."  With the possible exception of Kenneth Smith, known for rambling at great length on an assortment of philosophers, most critics stick close to the "intellectual comfort zone" provided by Little Karl and Big Sigmund.

Many critics don't invoke Marx or Freud outright.  Nevertheless, one can usually discern some indebtedness to the tedium-twins wherever one finds an attempt to marginalize a given reading-preference with some form of "negative compensation," as formulated by onetime Freud-acolyte Alfred Adler.  Wiki says in part:

Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. The compensation strategy, however does not truly address the source of this inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.

Because I'm working on the aforementioned series I'll try to keep my criticism of one such essay to a minimum, addressing for the time being just one section of Julian Darius's ON BODY TYPING IN COMICS.  The section entitled "What Male Readers Aren't Saying" begins with this assertion:

This cultural failing to address gender difference is part of what I hear, when a man says he faces body typing too and doesn’t whine about it. His statement translates roughly as, Hey, you wanted equality. How is it fair for you to complain about this but not me? But underneath even that is the deeper, underlying truth: I’m aroused by these pictures, and you’re saying they’re wrong.

This assertion would be stronger had it been built upon some fan's literal comment, but let's assume that such opinions have been expressed, possibly even in the comments-sections of Kelly Thompson essays.  I'm suspicious of the claim to boil down a "deeper, underlying truth," particularly when it takes the form of "methinks the fanboy protests too much" (a favorite Freud-strategy, by the way).  But at least there's a chain of logic here: if it doesn't apply to all, surely it applies to some.

The next decisive statement is more dubious:

I can’t recall a single man who’s dared to make the simple and obvious confession that these images make me horny.

Since Darius quotes from Thompson's essay, I wondered if he had read any of the comments on the essay as a resource.  It would seem not, as the very first post reads:

I like a certain amount of sexiness in comics, but the industry has taken that to an untenable point.

This is, to be sure, not a general defense of sexiness in comics, and the same is true in the ninth post:

 Very much agree. As a ten year old my Vampirella comic was kept hidden from my folks, and I thought it was great. But it was really one step away from action porn. Since I’m all “grown up” that shit just seems gratuitous and is laughable. Sexiest shot of a woman I have seen recently, is in the recent Batwoman, a super tight shot where she grins after realizing she is bullet proof. It was both bad ass, and hot.

I'll concede that Darius may've only been saying that people making unalloyed defenses of "sexism in comics" don't admit that the "images make them horny." I imagine that some defender somewhere has probably made the admission, though, and possibly along the same lines I have: that art should have the capacity to bring to life any fantasies whatever.  If it helps, I'll be happy to say that some comics-images make me horny.  However, I'm not a regular patron of comics these days, so I'm not precisely the best defender of the modern stuff, my liking for the Winick-March CATWOMAN notwithstanding.

 However, the following Darius quote allows for no equivocation about particular defenders:

 True, men might say that a woman (or a representation thereof) is “hot,” or even that they’d “do her.” But that’s an evaluation of a body, or a statement of what one would be willing to do to it, not a statement about the internal experience of the male in question. Despite these words’ aggression, they are a defensive way of speaking about a primal experience so strong that it alters even the way our brains process information. “I’d fuck her” usually really means “I want to fuck her but know I can’t.”

Now we're in the heart of the Negative Compensation Thicket.  Darius makes a major mistake by applying the same theory of defensiveness to the male gazer's target, irrespective as to whether it's a real "woman" or a "representation thereof."  Everything Darius then says about the male gazer's reasons for not believing that he can succeed at fucking said target-- that the gazer has pent-up doubts about his own manliness, because he's not wealthy or successful enough-- all of this is Pure Unalloyed Compensation Theory.

I'll pass quickly over the confusion between real and represented women, making the obvious jab that "I know I can't" means something very different with representations of women, simply because they aren't real.  Comics-drawings, photographs, movies on big or small screens-- not one of them has a vagina, penis, or any other sexual organ.  With that out of the way, the question becomes: does compensation theory apply if one is talking only about a flesh-and-blood object of desire?

I doubt it, particularly in terms of "wealth" and "success."  In my belief most men who fantasize about sex with (say) hot movie stars aren't compensating for anything in so doing.  Given that Darius admits that "male brains are visually aroused at much higher rates than women," why is it even necessary to posit some secondary reason behind the primary one of creating the aroused state?  If the real thing is not available for whatever reason, is there any reason not to take pleasure in the fantasy of arousal?

I presume that the real target here is not just the casual male gazer macking on some strange woman he sees on the street, but comics-buyers who validate so-called "objectification" by buying comics with lots of sexy imagery.  In contrast to Darius, I would jump to no conclusions about their motives in a universal sense, though yes, it's likely a lot of male readers buy them to masturbate.  I suppose it's possible that the upper 1% has access to hot and cold running vaginas, so that the wealthy and successful-- those that the rank-and-file male gazer supposedly envies-- never never never never bother with simple fantasies.  I suppose it's possible-- but I don't think it's likely.

 More on these matters when I have more time.

STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY

On the essay to which I’ve linked under JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT, the blogger henceforth known here as Colin Liar (no implied relation to Billy Liar) raised the question of my politics.  He went so far as to accuse me of a “faith-based” orientation, even though neither of the essays to which Liar responded (or any other essay on Sequart) concerned religion.  This accusation, while incredibly stupid even by the standards of the famed trope “someone is saying something stupid on the Internet,” prompts me to some observations about the nature of ultraliberal ideology.

I identify myself as a liberal, but I distance myself from all those who let liberal ideology do their thinking for them.  I consider such people to be “ultraliberals.”  Their responses to any sustained argument invariably comes down to quoting chapter-and-verse of whatever manifesto they favor.  This rote response renders them common kin with their supposed enemies, the “ultraconservatives.”

While I have written essays on religion on THE ARCHIVE, I feel reasonably sure that Liar read none of these in making his baseless accusation.  It’s far more likely that, given that he had simplistically labeled me a conservative because I opposed a particular liberal position—that of feminist Kelly Thompson—it stood to reason in his pea-brain that I must be opposing said liberal cause in the name of religion.  Obviously, to one governed by rote response, it goes without saying that all conservatives expouse religion, while no liberals do.

For me neither the total corpus of all things liberal nor the total corpus of all things conservative can be reduced to such pat formulas—though both ultraliberals and ultraconservatives manage to reduce themselves to formulaic creations.  Both “ultra” types suffer from a profound attachment to their formulaic responses, an attachment that has its origins in unresolved fear.

On a CBR messboard, I gave my terse (for me) answer to the question, “Why do we believe what we believe:”

We all believe what we believe because we're either reacting to fear of something that threatens us personally, or because we see that threat extended to a person or persons with whom we sympathize.

The extent to which a person will not hold reasoned discourse on a given topic marks the intensity of that fear.

The statement’s implications ally it loosely with the Adlerian theory of compensation, but hopefully with more of Adler’s original subtlety.  Adler realized that the sense of being threatened by outside forces was intrinsic to the nature of psychic formation, but he distinguished between ‘positive compensation,” which afforded the individual (and by extension, his society) some palpable advantage, and “negative compensation,” which was merely regressive in nature.  Thus when I characterize ultraliberals and ultraconservatives in terms of “unresolved fear,” I’m distinguishing that from a stance in which the subject confronts his fears with some open-mindedness, at the very least not resorting to empty rhetoric, or, of course, lies.

Now, when I made my original objections to the Kelly Thompson essay, one might say I was addressing a particular “fear” of mine.  The reforms for which Thompson called didn’t threaten me directly, since I don’t think Thompson’s essay is going to have any measurable effect on the marketing of direct-market comic books to a dominantly male audience.  But I do see her essay playing to certain ultraliberal positions, which I’ll examine more fully in another essay, and so I responded, knowing I wasn’t likely to convince anyone but still wishing to have my contrary say.  One could certainly disagree with my logic and conclusions without being an ultraliberal, but it’s impossible to do so by referring to stock arguments.

Take as a further example Colin Liar’s scorn for two intellectuals cited in an unrelated essay of mine: Nietzsche and Sade.  For Liar any interest in these two figures must be proof of some demonic desire to degrade women. 

Now, a half-intelligent liberal opposed to my views—or a half-intelligent conservative, for that matter—might have justified this fatuous position by quoting selected passages from the two authors. He might have quoted one of the most controversial passages from THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: “You are going to women?  Do not forget the whip!”  As for Sade, that’s even easier: one can hardly turn a page in Sade without finding the author describing the delights of torturing women (though a few pages allow for some masculine victims).

This position would have ignored the fact that both authors have been reclaimed to some extent by feminism.  One example of the reclamation of Nietzsche is the 1994 academic essay-collection NIETZSCHE AND THE FEMININE, in which roughly half of the contributing authors were unquestionably female. (Oddly, one author sports the same gender-ambivalent name as Ms. Thompson, “Kelly.”)  As for Sade, Angela Carter’s THE SADEAN WOMAN would refute a unilateral conflation of Sade and anti-feminism.

But ultraliberal Colin Liar doesn’t even mount the half-intelligent arguments.  He is so awash in his stock responses that he feels he can denigrate both authors in cavalier fashion and that none of his readers will demur—which, as of this writing, none of the Sequart respondents have.  Colin Liar shows supreme contempt for his audience by mounting such flimsy, not-even-half-intelligent arguments.  Their response thus far has been to roll over like dogs and ask for more.

Moreover, Liar doesn’t even realize how he’s contradicted his own position re: my “faith,” since even a half-intelligent opponent would know that neither Nietzsche nor Sade fit into a “faith-based” philosophy.

And this is my fear: that ultraliberals of such mammoth incompetence will someday become the norm in comics-criticism.  THE JOURNAL is bad, but at least it’s still half-intelligent.  What brave new comics-world can we foresee, if numbskulls like Colin Liar represent its dominant thought?

While Kelly Thompson’s essay is nowhere as massively idiotic as Colin Liar’s, she does endorse an ultraliberal position.  I’ll be analyzing a few more aspects of her problematic essay in future installments.

     

ADDENDA: I knew I shouldn't bother looking at Colin Liar's own blog, but I posted this anyway and wanted to put it here too, in the likelihood that he'll just erase it and so prove himself a coward as well as a moron and liar.

No time bother sorting through the above comments, most of which are crap-- and I especially wouldn't bother on a blog where I could be easily censored, but here's a response to Tordelback's comment:

"Your demolition of the childish whining of Mr. Philips was a pleasure to read, Colin."
If Colin Liar "demolished" me so well, why hasn't he responded to my counter-assertions in the comments-thread?

One word answer;

Chickenshit.

ADLER PATED

"The Superman fantasy stimulated a host of intellectuals to write interpretations analyzing in terms of Nietzschean and Freudian philosophy what any child could have told them. The truth was that Siegel and Schuster's imaginary world tended to be more Adlerian than Freudian... the drive wasn't for sex but for power, for the ability to dominate their environment through sheer brute strength."-- Jim Steranko, HISTORY OF COMICS.


I think highly of Alfred Adler despite my having some philosophical problems with his compensation theory, or at least with ways in which others have applied it. I confess I haven't read much Adler in the original-- only SUPERIORITY AND SOCIAL INSTINCT, a collection of some late essays. My reigning impression is that Adler may well have been a better psychoanalytic theorist than Freud or Jung, since his work seemed a lot more focused on treatment of patients than on promoting broad philosophical concepts. OTOH, the one book I read struck me as fairly dully written despite some strong ideas. It's amusing to wonder whether or not Freud and Jung may've become more popular with general audiences not because their ideas were better but simply because they were more entertainingly presented.


Now, there is a worthwhile nugget in the above Steranko quote, but to get to it, one has to dig through a small mountain of superficial thinking, which should demonstrate even to the staunchest Steranko fan that as a philosopher Steranko was a good artist. Even to someone like myself, not deeply acquainted with Adler, there's rich irony in seeing Steranko invoke Adlerian psychology as some sort of aegis against the foolish "even-a-child-knows-better" interpretations that invokes Nietzsche and Freud-- particularly when one knows Adler was strongly influenced by both Nietzsche and Freud. But why did Steranko feel moved to make such an untenable opposition?

One should remember that Steranko's two HOC books were written in the early 1970s. At that time the anti-comics hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s had long subsided, but the anti-comics polemics (Wertham's SEDUCTION, Legman's LOVE AND DEATH) could still be found in libraries, while the only noteworthy pro-comics books (Feiffer's GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES) were nostalgic in tone rather than full-fledged defenses of popular comics.


There can be little doubt that Steranko, like everyone else in the comics business back then, was aware of SEDUCTION, whether he'd read it or not. The Nietzschean remark strongly suggests that Steranko did read it, since one of Wertham's most telling anti-comics bromides asked the unmusical question, "How did Nietzsche" (i.e., naked power-fantasies) "get into the nursery?" Of course Wertham does not really interpret comics through a Nietzschean lens and I doubt anyone else ever did back then either; for Steranko it may have been enough that Wertham had equated Superman with Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Ironically, though Wertham was (unlike Gersom Legman) a genuine psychologist with a strong if not doctrinaire Freudian bent, it was Legman who actually comes off as the super-Freudian who sees sex in everything, particularly in the narrative element of violence in comic books. Still, Wertham does have his super-Freudian moments as well, and probably other "intellectuals" followed suit, so one need not presume that Steranko read the more obscure Legman, though the juxtaposition of "Nietzschean intellectuals" and "Freudian intellectuals" against Adler leads me to some interesting reflections about compensation theory.


Wiki's entry on compensation says:


"In psychology, compensation is a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or (drive towards) excellence in another area. Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. The compensation strategy, however does not truly address the source of this inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority."


Adler elucidated his compensation theory in 1907, six years after he became part of Freud's Vienna circle of psychology-minded colleagues. What precise influence Freud may've had on Adler's theories (or vice versa) I leave to the historians of such matters: likewise, the precise nature of Nietzsche's influence on both men. What interests me is how Adler's theory allows for both "positive" and "negative" versions of compensation, which is a distinction not seen much in critiques of pop culture, where the word "compensation" almost always comes up in a negative connotation. The most banal of these critiques interprets a consumer's liking for pop culture as the consumer's inability to deal with "reality" and his (negative) compensation through fantasy.

Given the affectionate attitude of Steranko's HISTORY toward popular comics, it's clear that this isn't the way he invokes Adler against the overintellectualizing adherents of Nietzsche and Freud, though Steranko's phrasing comes a little close to making the same sort of indictment of "negative compensation" made against Siegel and Schuster by their actual detractors. Gersom Legman, for example, would have made no bones about viewing Siegel and Schuster as pornographers who offered the dominations of "sheer brute strength" as a "negative compensation" in place of sexual excitement, while at the same time taking to task the society that made possible such perversities.

Thus Steranko is at least half-right: Adler can be used as a counteragent against the reductive tendencies of Freud, at least as transmitted through his fellow travelers (Freud himself having written very little on specific items of popular literature).

Ironically, though, Steranko gives Nietzsche a bum rap as being an inspiration for effete intellectualism, when in fact certain of Nietzsche's writings might suggest the very sort of "positive compensation" Steranko might've endorsed, had he understood how little Wertham's vilification of Nietzsche had to do with the philosopher's writings.

I would view the following Nietzsche-aphorism as implying the dynamics of positive compensation:

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

And in future essays I'll talk more about why this notion of positive compensation ought to receive more consideration in the stunted world of comics criticism.