This slim book, taken from lectures given on commencement days at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute over a 10-year period, pokes fun at the self-importance of analysts.

When I was working in Paris in the early 1970s, Peter Ustinov made a public appearance there to further the cause of his organization for “the Promotion of Humor in International Affairs.” This cause was difficult to promote because of rifts in the international community based on rivalries, narcissism, and, worst of all, what Thomas Carlyle referred to as “puffery and quackery,” that horrifying pair of human foibles, twin pillars of “Mighty Seriousness.”1

Freeman is striving in this book to promote humor in psychoanalytic affairs, a most worthy undertaking and one in which he has far too little company. Fortunately, the company he does have—the community at the