Get This Season off the Couch!

By Frank Trippett

They begin turning up this time of year as reliably as gaudy lights and the Salvation Army, and with furrowed brows they hand the public a unique gift--clear warnings about the morbid hazards that lurk in the traditional seasonal celebrations. They are the jolly diagnosticians, and they dirge forth chanting their own anthem, a sort of Fugue for Handwringers, the gist of which is that there may be poisoned plums in the pudding.

The holidays, they say, and especially Christmas, inflame neurosis, trigger depression, accentuate loneliness. The very expectation of joy becomes a source of gloom. Adults get pressured into the hypocrisy of mingling with people they do not like and going to churches they do not believe in. Children get confused by the Santa hokum; they wind up either addicted to greed by too many presents or ridden with envy by too few. Families obliged to reassemble are rent by old grudges set to festering again. Furthermore, since Christmas dominates the marathon Thanksgiving-to-New Year's celebrations, non-Christians get painful left-out feelings.

This grim picture of the winter holidays accumulated in psychological literature and passed, during the last generation, into the popular domain. These days it can be casually overheard around almost any office, street corner or watering hole. Indeed, many Americans have begun to sound, and a few to act, as though the appropriate way to navigate the holidays is with a clipboard and psychiatric checklist for keeping track of casualties.

So fretful is the atmosphere achieved by the clinical view that some people are even turning to ever increasing preholiday workshops that offer to help them "cope" with seasonal stress. This trend in popular therapy reached a bizarre pinnacle this year with the scheduling, in New York, of an eleven-day "antiholiday" workshop starting three days before Christmas. It was conceived by a therapist who says she and her followers hope to "create new rituals and celebrations" while at the same time they cure themselves of the old.

Admittedly, some of the pathological grist is not just humbug. The shrinks do gear up as though for combat duty during the holidays. Emotional turmoil is easily noticeable and evidently widespread. One pioneering study of Christmas neurosis, published by the University of Utah School of Medicine in the 1950s (and mined ever since by writers assigned to recycle the annual piece on "the holiday blues"), established that as many as nine out of ten people suffer "adverse emotional reactions to Christmas pressures."

The dreary litany seems endless. Even suicide is said to increase during the season, but this claim is disputed. No matter. Even if suicides decline, the rest of the diagnosis is enough to make the holiday seem like a prolonged calamity. Before Americans completely succumb to such an impression, now is the time to diagnose the diagnosis.

One need not quibble with particular findings to detect their limits. Let the stunning statistic from the Utah study stand--but add to it the universal knowledge that roughly ten out often people suffer "adverse emotional reactions" to life itself. Those who do not ought to have their heads examined. Even saints--especially saints--anguish. Evidently humankind from ages immemorial has known a rough time in that darkest gully of the year the season of the winter solstice. In fact, most historians agree that it was precisely to relieve the morbidity inherent in the season that the species invented the extravagant celebrations that have endured to this day.

The old pagan celebrations, which had gone on for millenniums, continued for centuries after the birth of Christ. It was to steer the energies of the celebrants into more pious channels--so says Francis X. Weiser, S.J., in The Christmas Book that the church in the 4th century picked, as Christmas Day, exactly the date that signaled the end of the Roman Saturnalia. The origin of the celebrations at least raises the question of which came first, seasonal malaise or the celebrations? Could it be that the rituals cure far more gloom than they precipitate? Surely such issues should not be abdicated entirely to social pathologists.

The trouble with the now pervasive clinical view of the holidays is that, along with offering undeserved comfort to unreconstructed Scrooges, it tends to confuse many perfectly healthy people about their own emotional condition. Even casual observation confirms that many weave through the holidays feeling vaguely like victims--acutely aware of the supposedly malignant pressures that the diagnosticians always talk about. No mystery here. With a consciousness razed by standard holiday pathology, even an intelligent adult may tend to construe the pressure as a symptom of something bad and imminent. In fact, that pressure is primarily only the moving power of a vast communal celebration. This coercive atmosphere is not just an incidental effect of the season, as some suggest, but its very essence.

Every human ritual, after all, owns the ulterior intent of pressing people out of habituated everyday behavior. Just as a parade or fiesta is intended to tug people en masse onto the streets to see and celebrate who they are, so the rites of the winter holidays are aimed at prying people out of their diurnal' ruts into unaccustomed minglings, new communions, fresh gestures. The purpose of it all, undeclared and unsentimental, is to arouse a general reaffirmation of the commonality of life as the year's shortest day comes and goes. While emotionally fragile individuals may suffer special aggravations as a result, the temperamental thrash that most people feel is often no deeper than their resistance to being nudged out of narrow everyday patterns. The pressure of the season is only the mute wish of a society that yearns, against all odds, for a sense of wholeness.

But that is not a charade in psychodrama. It is the troubled world for real, and the jargon of the clinic does not begin to describe its complexities. Neither does the carping of the cynic. It is not all hypocritical to surrender to the pressure to join somehow in the celebration. It is merely human, and quite possibly of value. Even a trivial card sent by rote can sustain a tie that would otherwise vanish. A hand extended in feigned cordiality to an old adversary may turn out to have more moral worth than the embrace of an old friend. Obligatory attendance at socials, like reunions with chilly kinsmen, offers as much chance of warmth as of friction. A person even tempted to become a once-a-year churchgoer may thereby be moved to the only reflection since last year on the inscrutable powers that play over creation. Joining in, as even the professional diagnosticians insist, is the best remedy for the holiday blues. --Frank Trippett

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