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Recurrent references to a joke by both analyst and patient during the last two years of a seven-year analysis allowed exploration of the patient's diverse motives for telling it. Understanding the multiple meanings of the joke led to changes in the way she viewed the world, changes in her personal life, and most important to her, changes in the comfort with which she was able to deal with certain ongoing provocations of conflict in her environment. Work on the joke seemed to enhance access to her affective and fantasy life. A parallel is suggested between wit, humor, and jokes as expressions of fantasy. A comparison of jokes with symptoms and dreams as foci for analytic work is sketched with an implication for analytic technique.
For Freud (1905) dreams and neuroses (Freud, 1901) were the data from which the hypothesis of unconscious mental conflict was derived. As a scientific investigator, Freud looked to jokes for new data on which to test this hypothesis. And jokes turned out to confirm it. The process of creating a joke involved such elements of dream work