I was reading Viktor Frankl's The Doctor and The Soul and I was particularly fascinated by a particular therapy technique called paradoxical intention, which have been successful for anxiety attack patients. Frankl describes a patient who sweats a lot when he is meeting new people. The paradoxical intention treatment advised is that when the patient feels the anxiety attack coming, he would have to tell himself, in good humour, to sweat a lot, in buckets. The patient found that when deliberately invoked, he could not sweat! And this treatment have been successful for other anxiety attack sufferers and other obsessive-compulsive disorders.
I was intrigued, not by the treatment in itself, but it just dawned on me that actually some psychoses originate from taking yourself too seriously; or in other words the inability to laugh at yourself; that's why the paradoxical intention has to be applied in ironical manner, in good humour! As Frankl himself points out, only humans have a sense of humour. This is not trivial, since the presence of humour indicates that we have higher level of consciousness: we are able to detach ourselves and observe from another perspective (theory of mind comes to mind). To be able to laugh at yourself, at all, means you have to transcend yourself.
I suppose the use of humour as defense mechanism is not new for some, especially for those in grad school, whose spirits will just break in the face of it all without a coping mechanism.We fail our experiment, drone at our workstation, wonder on the meaning of life, check our PHD comics and get back to it when we have laughed at ourselves sufficiently.
So if you are having existential crisis just go laugh at the face of the cosmos, laugh at the cosmic irony of existence, laugh at yourself for failing to pinpoint what exactly is the irony. You may look totally insane but actually that will keep you sane.
