Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

Getting beneath the skin of the tickling phenomenon

The boys took this for granted because tickling for pleasure was common at this time among children. Some came from what were known as ‘tickling families’, where the habit of prolonged stroking or rubbing, usually of backs, was passed on from parents to children. One example was Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), the writer. In her book A Nursery in the Nineties, she says the tickling habit came through her mother. She and her siblings would tickle or stroke each other for hours, the younger ones being bribed by sweets or even money. I knew a boy whose two big sisters got him to tickle their backs every morning, under their nighties. The activity was perfectly proper, for both were extremely prudish, and he was strictly enjoined only to touch their backs. He was very small, too, and had to be rewarded, he said, with dolly mixtures, aniseed balls and pear drops. Another family of children I know of would sit in a kind of triangular circle on the floor, two girls and a boy, each tickling the back of the one in front of them. The process might take hours, for gentle tickling and stroking is, for some, such an immensely pleasurable activity that they want it to go on for ever.

This is a subject which has not been written about very much, and children who have enjoyed years of tickling by siblings rarely talk about it except to intimates. The reason may be that they recognise, though they might not have done so at the time, that tickling is a form of sex, certainly of sensuality, and there is something to be ashamed of in such practices which might almost be termed incestuous. Babies, for instance, like being tickled, but only if they are sure it is safe. Experiments at Yale University on babies of under a year revealed that they laughed 15 times more often when tickled by their mothers than when tickled by anyone else. A baby, the explanation runs, perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in mildly aggressive disguise. The mock attack must be perceived as only pretence, and when it is done by anyone except the mother, the baby cannot be sure. Thus psychologists think that the tension between the tickles is relieved by the laughter which accompanies the squirm of the body. The tickler impersonates the aggressor but is known not to be one. This is why children like it so much, for it enables them to live on two levels, the same sensation induced in them by horror movies and comics of monsters.

It is a sombre fact that you can’t tickle yourself — it just doesn’t work. So, these are my thoughts on a — ha! — ticklish subject. For an expert view, see On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored by the brilliant Adam Phillips.