|
Brief notes on humour in the psychoanalytic clinic
José Alberto Zusman*
Abstract: Freud, despite having dedicated considerable time to the study of humour, did little investigation on its applications in the clinical practice. A correlate to interpretation, humour remained historically associated to a personal gift, a rare talent, and as such, restricted to few priviledged ones. Thus humour, while being a talent, has entered the list of impossible human elements to be transmitted. Given the supposed impossibility of being a tool to teaching, in the psychoanalytical field humour ended disregarded to a topic of social/cultural interest. However, humour can be such important to psychoanalytical technique that presently some consider it as a clinical parameter of improvement. There is an aspect of humour that enlarges the human being’s capacity of tolerating limits and the adversities imposed by reality. Humour is perhaps one of the great routes to build the hard task of trying to see pain in such a way that it does not obstruct the process of growth.
Keywords: psychoanalysis; humour; psychoanalytic technique.
Back
The comic of laughter
Rogério Nogueira Coelho de Souza*
Abstract: The author comments on Professor Franklin Leopoldo e Silva’s interview outlining the most important elements of Bergson’s philosophical work which sustain the comprehension of his book Laughter. He links the philosopher’s ideas with Freud’s psychoanalytical cooperation in order to attain laughter, comic and humour phenomena, taking not only the theorical ideas of such authors, but also by offering a brief passage of a patient’s dream. This passage, while being a fragment of clinical material, points to the possibility of considering those phenomena in the social, intersubjective and intrapsychic dimension. He still suggests that the wit of laughter consists on its condition to renew the movements of life before paralizations of conflictive or de-humanizing nature.
Keywords: laughter; comic; wit; Bergson.
Back
On laughter
Gilbert Diatkine
Abstract: After reviewing Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious as well as numerous recent French psychoanalytical papers concerning Laughter, the author has reached the following propositions: a) the difference among wit, humor and comic is less absolute than what was stated by Freud; b) the Superego is reduced to silence in the three cases through refined verbal techniques within the joke, through a wise utilization of gesture, make-up or setting and of a framing in the comical through the presentation of a threatening reality in a funny manner in the case of humor; c) in the three cases, the secondary processes are utilized to give access to the primary process and t the satisfaction of repressed sexual and aggressive drives; d) the young child’s laughter while encountering her parents after a separation period is the prototype of comical laughter; e) amongst all repressed drives that are satisfied in this re-encounter, the desire of incorporating the object is present, followed by an internal genital sexual excitement; f) the one that laughs is the one that totally lets go in this passive excitement. The comedian needs the one that laughs in order to enjoy this situation without losing the integrity of his phallic narcissism.
Keywords: laughter; humour; joke; child and genital organization.
Back
The well tempered psychoanalytic: Mood, style and metaphor in the psychoanalytic process
José Carlos Calich
Abstract: The author proposes a reflection on the interaction between humor and the analytic situation on the light of the new conjectures about psychic functioning, interpretation and the psychoanalytic process, that recent debates in our discipline propose. A comparison between the structure of humorous communication and metaphor is presented, taken as an essential virtue of analytical interpretation. It is also suggested the difference between metaphoric and metonymic humor, with different valuations in the psychoanalytical process. At last, it is evoked the evaluation of its utilization “in-situation” and in the individuality of the analytic pair.
Keywords: humour; process psychoanalytic; metaphor; metonymic; interpretation; interpretative style.
Back
Psychoanalysis in the face of trauma, humour and hope
Gley Silva de Pacheco Costa*
Abstract: The author considers humour as a functional defence related to creativity, through which it is possible to psychically deal with the traumatic experience and rescue the meaning of life. He outlines the importance of differentiating the humour of thoughts, sympathetic, mystical, philosophical and apocalyptical. Taking Avner Ziv as a reference, he summarizes the three main characteristics of humour, which are: utilizing imagination in order to distort a painful reality, contributing for group cohesion (more specific to Jewish humour) and self-criticism. Two films about the Holocaust – Life is beautiful and Jakob the Liar – illustrate the need for humour, whose metapsychological processing is intermediated by the superego as representative of environmental support. He concludes by stating that the initial relationship with an empathetic mother allows the individual to face life difficulties with some humour and hope as a way out – the same one that is expected in an analytical treatment.
Keywords: trauma; humour; hope; suffering; creativeness; literature; cinema; Holocaust; illusion; Eros; superego; self-preservation.
Back
Integrative function of humour
Maria Stela de Godoy Moreira
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy in the use of humor in the psychoanalytical relationship and to rehabilitate its value in the interplay of intrapsychic and interpersonal relationships. In three clinical vignettes we found that humor eases mental pain, making it tolerable to the patient as he evolves from schizo-paranoid dispersion toward depressive integration. Conversely, it also leads to rupture and insight. This dynamism amplifies tolerance to frustration, and makes thinking possible. Humor establishes the link responsible for the evolution of the acquired experience. Its function is to modify introjective identification and to produce a new modality of object relations.
Keywords: mental pain; ideogram; deep language; simbolic forms; acustic image .
Back
Humour and psychical change: Ariadne’s narrative thread
Lenita Osório Araújo*
Abstract: The author examines a countertransference difficulty in a psychoanalytical treatment of a narcissistic personality organization, considering the theoretical approaches developed by Freud and others authors, especially Winnicott. By doing this, she considers the possibility to think about humour in transference as a transitional phenomenon to reduce the impasses of the interpretation so as to promote psychical changes.
Keywords: humour; defence; narcissism; psychical change; superego.
Back
Humour by hazard
Aida Maria Moraes Ungier
Abstract: The author, refleting about the metapsychology of the humor’s phenomenon, proposes that it should be a product of sublimation, pulsional destiny par excellence and mark of the constitution of the subject. Therefor, she uses the Lacanian rereading of the concepts of death instincts and sublimation, coupling them with the philosophical concepts of tragic and hazar.
Keywords: humour; death instincts; sublimation; tragic; hazard.
Back
The ethics of happiness and human relationship
Morgana Masetti
Abstract: This paper seeks, through the work of the so-called Happiness Doctors – professional clowns who visit hospitalized children on a regular basis –, the discussion over the ethics of happiness while establishing quality relationships. Through Espinosa’s definition on happiness, these artists’ actions have been connected to aspects of Winnicott’s theory.
Keywords: joy; child; hospital; health; to play; clown.
Back
Trauma and remembrance, reality and/or certainty
César Botella
Abstract: A new conception of trauma has imposed itself in contemporary psychoanalysis. The author advocates for negative trauma and describes the need to encounter a new interpretative mode that enables the revelation of such negative, which is not a mnésique sign, but still names memory without memoirs. The newly described concepts are necessary to enable reflection on practice and theory of this new psychic life canvas.
Keywords: therapeutics direction; negative trauma; memory without memoirs; effective reality feeling (Wirklichkeitsgefülh); conviction; material regression; reality inclination; transforming dynamics; representation-perception-delusion; principle of coherence-convergence.
Back
Perceptive thought and thoughtful perception in clinical psychoanalysis
Charles Hanly
Abstract: An adequate epistemology for psychoanalysis must take into account that the analyst’s personality is unavoidably an instrument of the analytic work along with the analyst’s knowledge and intelligence. Also experience without thought is blind and thought without experience is abstract and empty. The paper is a sketch for a critical realist epistemology for psychoanalysis employing clinical evidence.
Keywords: critical realism; empiricism; perceptive thought; realism; subjectivity; subjectivist epistemology; subjectivism; thoughtful perception.
Back
Reconstruction revisited
Robert L. Pyles
Abstract: This paper explores the concept of reconstruction, from a number of perspectives: clinical, theoretical, and historical. A clinical vignette is presented, in which the parent of the patient is experienced as using reconstruction in a destructive way. This is contrasted with proper use of reconstruction by the analyst. The tension between these two is used as an opportunity to discuss the relation between “transference interpretation” and “reconstruction” as clinical techniques. The historical evolution of reconstruction and transference interpretation is traced, beginning with Freud, and moving onto an examination of how more modern writers have dealt with this issue.
Keywords: reconstruction; transference; transference interpretation; clinical technique.tic Association.
Back
| 
Português
