SOURCE: "On Nonsense," in Psychoanalysis—A General Psychology. International Universities Press, Inc., 1966, pp. 655-77.

In the following excerpt, Greenacre discusses nonsense and aggression as they are manifested in the works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

This paper will deal with nonsense and its relation to aggression and anxiety. It draws largely on the study of the nonsense of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and Looking Glass countries, and somewhat less on that of the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear. But before discussing the nonsense of these two authors we must first approach the question of what we mean by nonsense anyway. Very many definitions of nonsense have been given by the various critics of this field of literature. Of these only a few will be mentioned.

Emile Caemmerts (1925) points out that the general opinion of nonsense is that it consists of anything which displeases you or any statement with...