Psychology of Laughter in a Structural-Dialectical Approach

Abstract

<p>The article is devoted to the discussion of the psychology of laughter from the perspective of its functional purpose in culture. Addressing the topic of laughter is needed to describe its counterintuitive nature, consisting of dialectical contradictions. The study of the formation of laughter in children's subculture and its inclusion in the subject area of developmental psychology is of immediate interest. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychological significance of laughter in culture as a system of normative situations. We assumed that in a normative situation such as a biosocial unit of culture, laughter will manifest itself as a phenomenon of a binary nature, containing contrasting relations. The structural-dialectical method of analysis, which consists of the search for contrasts, made it possible to build an explanatory model of the phenomenon under study. In the capacity of binary pairs in the study of laughter as a psychological phenomenon, such antinomies as "freedom-fear", "good-evil", "world-antiworld" were singled out. Laughter as a psychological phenomenon has a dialectical structure in which fear gives rise to the desire for freedom; the cultural mission of laughter is associated with the discovery of evil as a violation of the norm and good as the inviolability of culture. The condition for overcoming fear and achieving illusory freedom through laughter is the displacement of evil into the unreal world, which leads to the supra-situation of the subject.</p>