Article: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: Humor as a Fundamental Emotional Experience

This paper discusses the use of humor and jokes in psychoanalysis from both theoretical and clinical perspectives. I review and extend Freud's concept of "joke-work" as a parallel to "dream-work" and suggest that his interest in jokes brought him to the limits of the one-person energy theory and to the threshold of two-person relational theory. The paper expands concepts derived from Klein, Lacan, and Matte-Blanco in the development of both an intrapsychic and an intersubjective understanding of jokes and humor. This contemporary perspective on jokes and humor allows us to enter into a view of the unconscious as a transformational system that addresses issues of powerlessness, ...

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