On Tickling

Ever wondered why we never tickle adults? Tickling can be violent, humiliating, sexual and rarely playful. Its always an act that dwells in a liminal space. It mirrors the ambivalence of most of our sexual and emotional experiences. One can never tickle oneself. Tickling requires the other and often happens at the boundaries between the self and the other. The act of tickling can be an object of analysis to understand power, dominance, sadism, gender, banter, violence, eroticism, vulnerability, discipline, discomfort and so much more!

Last night, a conversation around ‘tickling’ made me revisit the psychoanalyst Adam Phillip’s essay ‘On Tickling’. For Phillips:

Through tickling, the child will be initiated in a distinctive way and into the helplessness and disarray of a certain primitive kind of pleasure, dependent on the adult to hold and not to exploit the experience. And this means to stop at the blurred point, so acutely felt in tickling, at which pleasure becomes pain, and the child experiences an intensely anguished confusion; because the tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax. It has to stop, or the real humiliation begins.

And:

Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of the overdisplacement of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract? Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?

Wikipedia also has a page on Tickle Torture which lists a primitive European torture called ‘Goat’s Tongue’:

in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim’s feet because they had been dipped in salt water. Once the goat had licked the salt off, the victim’s feet would be dipped in the salt water again and the process would be repeated

And I also remembered that Shylock’s famous monologue in the Merchant of Venice, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’, also has this line: ‘If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”

Image Source: NYT piece cautioning parents on the limits of tickling