Key points

Trolling, which most often occurs online, is typically viewed as antithetical to community.

Understanding trolling's roots could help address online polarization.

Yet Alfie Bown, who studies psychoanalysis, argues that trolls are engaging in a form of community-seeking.

Bown links trolling to Freud's castration wish for social inclusion.

What do we make of trolling from a psychological point of view?

Is it a new unrestrained form of sadism unleashed by the internet? Is it a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, externalized via memes ? Or is it a cry for attachment ? A perverse form of inviting community and fellowship?

This latter claim is advanced by Alfie Bown in his book Post-Comedy . In it, Bown traces some of the history of comedy in the West with an aim of

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