Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy

Cutting-edge philosophers, psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and scholars use Freud and Lacan to understand laughter, humor, and the comic.

Patricia Gherovici (Edited by), Manya Steinkoler (Edited by)

9781107086173, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 August 2016

265 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.49 kg

This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian practitioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume proposes a paradigm swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel. Psychoanalysis has long been associated with tragedy and there is a strong warrant to take up comedy as a more productive model for psychoanalytic practice and critique. Jokes and the comic have not received nearly as much consideration as they deserve given the fundamental role they play in our psychic lives and the way they unite the fields of aesthetics, literature, and psychoanalysis. Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy addresses this lack and opens up the discussion.

Introduction Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler
Part I. The Laughing Cure: 1. Sarah's laughter: where babies and humor come from Manya Steinkoler
2. Psychoanalysis as Gai Saber: towards a new episteme of laughter Dany Nobus
3. Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan Patricia Gherovici
4. The surplus jouissance of the joke: from Freud to Lacan Marcel Drach
5. Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy of jokes Jean Michel Rabaté
6. Mother Pumper and the analyst's donuts Jamieson Webster
7. Not in the humor: bulimic dreams Carol Owens
Part II. Comedy on the Couch: 8. Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after Zizek's Lacanian dialectics Geoff Boucher
9. Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer Night's Dream Matthew Sharpe
10. Jane Austen's wit-craft Molly Rothenberg
11. The sexual politics of comedy: Henry James's 'The Chaperon' Sigi Jöttkandt
12. Power in the closet: and its coming out Alenka Zupan?i?
Part III. He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Last: Epilogue: repetition, repetition, repetition: Richard Prince and the three R's Simon Critchley.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]