Lacan, psychoanalysis and comedy

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.

Machine generated contents note: pt. I LAUGHING CURE -- 1.Sarah's laughter: Where babies and humor come from / Manya Steinkoler -- 2.Psychoanalysis as gai saber: Toward a new episteme of laughter / Dany Nobus -- 3.Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan / Patricia Gherovici -- 4.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 Rabate -- 6.Mother-pumper and the analyst's donuts / Jamieson Webster -- 7.Not in the humor: Bulimic dreams / Carol Owens -- pt. II COMEDY ON THE COUCH -- 8.Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer Night's Dream / Matthew Sharpe -- 9.Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after Zizek's Lacanian dialectics / Geoff Boucher -- 10.Jane Austen's wit-craft / Molly Anne Rothenberg -- 11.perambulatory process: Eros, wit and society-testing in Henry James's "The Chaperon" / Sigi Jottkandt -- 12.Power in the closet (and its coming out) / Alenka Zupancic -- pt. III HE WHO LAUGHS LAST, LAUGHS LAST -- Epilogue: Repetition, repetition, repetition: Richard Prince and the three r's / Simon Critchley.