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“The success is simple: It's very, very funny,” the great straight man and comic Carl Reiner says about Mel Brooks's The Producers (Boston Globe, June 15, 2003). Dan Gunn's antic, penetrating autobiographical fiction, Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis, is also a success, portraying the power of a sound psychoanalytic treatment by being very, very funny.
Gunn's character, also named Dan Gunn, recounts the final month of a six-year analysis. How does one speak to a psychoanalyst, and what makes it different from all other ways of speaking? In this delightful book, Gunn contrasts the discourse of the couch to all other social discourses; the result is unique insight. As Ana-Maria Rizzuto (2003) has put it, “The analyst asks the analysand to use language in a manner that he or she has never done before” (p. 307). Wool-Gathering's analytic couple are supremely up to their task, Gunn indefatigably delivering hilarious shtick to the analyst as straight man. And Gunn gets the tone right, creating through the jokes a serious, convincing portrait of an analytic pair engaged in the tender work of parting.
But he does more. In finding a language adequate to the profundity and poignancy of a good treatment's conclusion, Gunn also offers an implicit commentary on the ponderous, unleavened quality of much psychoanalytic writing. Comedy explodes jargon. Subtle and sophisticated