Revue Française De Psychanalyse. XXXVII, 1973: Freud between the Two Topographies: The Comic after 'Humour' (1927), an Unfinished Analysis. Jean Guillaumin. Pp. 607-654.

Guillaumin emphasizes the importance of the concepts of humor and the comic for the structural theory. The author's hypothesis is that the topographical point of view is inadequate to assure the originality of the psychoanalytic approach. Freud encountered difficulties in his first work on this subject in 1905; these difficulties were the result of the inadequacies of the topographical point of view. The weaknesses of the topographical theory made evident the urgency of the second topography (the structural theory). The 1905 work derived essentially from the confusions of a dualist epistemology that was dominant in the nineteenth century—the preoccupations of Fechner and psychophysics. Guillaumin argues that the structural hypothesis resolves many questions raised by the topographical theory, and attempts to show in a detailed analysis how the structural hypothesis accounts for the comic, including theories of projection, identification, aggression, and the 'socialization' of the ego in its microsociology of intra- and intersystemic elements. He suggests that an adequate theory of the comic presupposes the structural hypothesis; in fact, anticipations of a structural theory can even be discerned in the 1905 study, according to Guillaumin.