[astrobe_]

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss -- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall -- this rushing annihilation -- for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination -- for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.

In The Imp of the Perverse by E.A. Poe.

[taneq]

Thanks! I'd heard this phenomenon referred to as "the imp of the perverse" but I didn't know the source.

I've always thought it was some mental phenomenon where any sufficiently strong result ('don't jump') automatically comes with a weak inverse result ('jump!'). Never figured out whether it was some kind of mental self-check mechanism to catch strongly held false beliefs, or whether it's just a quirk of the way nerves work (sort of like a mental after-image), but I definitely get it. (And it's not just about jumping personally, if I'm standing holding a laptop near a long drop I'll feel a shadow of an urge to hurl it off... it's really weird.)