Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Annie Reich commented that, while the therapeutic value of humor is known and used in analysis, this is the first time it has been subjected to specific investigation. Humor as used by Dr. Rosen is a technical device that provides the ego with a reward of pleasure for accepting some aspect of the primary process, but it can be of use only if the unconscious process is near the surface. The defense of isolation in obsessives provides a basis for contrasting them with comics, but obsessional patients also show the defenses of undoing, reaction-formation, and turning into the opposite. These defenses lend themselves less easily to Dr. Rosen's comparisons. It is true that obsessive patients are regularly grimly serious and that the ability to be less serious is a sign of gain in their treatment. But they can also joke compulsively. Their most important material is not in their jokes, which they use to bribe and woo the analyst. A shift from active to passive, masculine to feminine, etc., in comic phenomena seems to be more closely linked to severe pregenital than to obsessive phenomena. One manic-depressive patient identified with the victim during this phase. Some of the humor was funny to the audience, but not to the patient. It is important to make this distinction. Dr. Reich would restress how important for the treatment was the analyst's talent for joking. Not everyone possesses this ability. Beginners especially should be cautious in using it. Fenichel possessed this faculty to a high degree.

Dr. Henry Edelheit thought that in obsessive patients the elements of aggressor, victim, and motive for attack were not isolated one from the other. In the examples presented, aggressor and victim were confused and the motive was left in doubt. In primal scene fantasies of obsessive patients, affect is isolated from content, but within the content itself the patient may identify with both aggressor and victim or oscillate between them. This co