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Patient (in his first session): Do you take notes?
Analyst: I take notes, checks, credit cards, IOU's.
-From an American Psychoanalytic Association panel on transference issues related to fees.
The preceding joke is prima facie evidence not only that analysts can laugh (the Empire Room at the Waldorf erupted with laughter) but that they possess a sense of humor, the hallmark of which is being able to laugh at oneself. The mechanics of this joke, whose gist must be lost in any analysis, is a play on words. The analytic aspects concern an economy of meaning, surprise, and a release of tension. Today's analysts are entitled to share in our American tendency to be as uptight about money as we once were about sex.
Freud, whose theories underlie the deeper reading of this joke, was no Me1 Brooks, but he had a sense of humor-on occasion about money. When the Gestapo raided his apartment of 6,000 Austrian schillings ($8,400.00), he ruefully quipped that “he had never been paid so much for a single visit” (Jones, 1957, Vol. 3, p. 219). He could also train his trenchant wit outward, as when he remarked to Ferenczi that Lou Andreas-Salome, “is a highly significant woman, even though all the tracks around her go into the lion's den but none come out” (Judith Dupont on the role of humor in the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, in Barron, p. 171). This display of wit, with its oblique tribute to female power levied on a friend who was welcomed for extended visits in the Freud household, is more playful than sinister in its extended metaphor.
The recognition of our capacity for play as arising in an intermediate space able to accommodate illusion and preserve a “core of liveliness,” (p. 194) leads to the second great psychoanalytic theorist on the Comic, D. W. Winnicott, who not only was given to clowning and