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“… Guard yourself from despondency above all, for it is worse and more harmful than sin. When the Evil Urge wakens desires in man, he is not concerned with plunging him into sin, but with plunging him into despondency by way of his sinning.”
Grotjahn (1957) has pointed out that laughter “has a tendency to disappear when we focus our intellect on it and try to understand it.” Nevertheless, he believes that an understanding of laughter can facilitate an easier relation to one's own unconscious and to the unconscious of others. Humor and subsequent laughter can be used to express a variety of emotions, as well as provide an opportunity for guilt-free expression of aggressive and sexual impulses. Humor and laughter can also serve self-esteem on a cognitive-perceptual level in which “getting the joke” produces a sense of mastery over the symbolism and levels of meaning (Levine, 1969). “Making the joke” provides a similar opportunity. There is also a creative dimension in humor, since the synthesis of disparate levels of symbolism and meaning which result in laughter parallels other creative acts. These few remarks are intended to allude to some of the principal ideas which have appeared in the literature concerning the structure and function of humor.
Since my subject has to do with the uses of wit and humor in psychotherapy, I offer a standard definition of humor (Webster II) before proceeding to clinical examples, i.e., “The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings or acts; ….” Wit, in its turn, has been defined as, “… Felicitous percepception