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Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler’s recent publication of collected essays lives up to its name: Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy is a wide-ranging and thoughtful collection written with clarity, insight, and of course, humor. Though the collection tackles complex clinical and theoretical issues that might be familiar only to analysts and specialists, it also provides clear and compelling introductory remarks on psychoanalysis and comedy. The collection fills a particular lack in the psychoanalytic bibliography; namely, an inattention to its comedic and humorous underpinnings. In a word, psychoanalysis is funny. Gherovici and Steinkoler “propose a paradigm swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel” (p. 1). The collection is structured in three parts: (1) discussions of comedy and humor in psychoanalytic theory and analytic situations, (2) analyses of cultural and societal issues through the comedic lens of psychoanalysis, and (3) an epilogue consisting of a textual stand-up routine on “repetition, repetition, repetition” from Simon Critchley. Put in the classic structure of a joke, part one theorizes psychoanalysis and/as comedy; part two applies this theory to culture and society; and part three delivers the punchline.
In shifting the conversation to comedy, the editors and contributors intend to move psychoanalysis away from a focus on the tragic and universal narrative of the Oedipus Complex and instead focus on the personal and the practical. This new emphasis on “the silliness implicit in the notion of the phallus,” the editors argue, better illuminates crucial psychoanalytic concepts, like the unconscious, condensation, and the death drive (p. 7). But not only does “comedy allow access to the unconscious,” it also helps us access the “unconscious” of psychoanalysis itself (p. 1). In addition to fleshing out the content of psychoanalysis, comedy opens up new theoretical trajectories in the form of new connections to textual interpretation, clinical practic