You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This study starts with a careful review of Freudian texts, underlining the Jewish matrix and connection with the obvious attention given to energy saving (inhibitory, representational and emotional saving), following Freud's teaching on Witz and humorism, on the analogies and differences compared with dreaming and the playful component. Then it moves on to other authors such as Kris, who develops the idea of regression at the service of the Ego (and of art), with the double-edged quality of comedy - when it isn't successful in triumphing over the fears it ought to exorcize or when it oversteps the limits of procuring opportunism. Then comes Th. Reik who sees a component of protest against authority in humorism, - S, Feldmann who focuses on the as if aspect used by the child to try to deny experienced or acted out aggression, transforming it into something to laugh about. Several authors reflect on the masochistic side of humour. For his part, Arieti seeks, through the tertiary process, a harmonization between the primary and secondary processes, between paleological and logical modes; he says that a confrontation between the two modes takes place in humorism, in art an agreement.
One chapter is dedicated to the cognitivist perspective and to the psychology of form, which often attribute the sense of comedy to the effect of a rapid change between figure and background, or of divergent thinking and therefore creativity. These theories point out the analogy of humorism, science and art (Koestler); liberating creative acts with the common capacity for overruling habits in favour of originality and differing in emotional atmosphere. For Bariaud, humour is the consequence of thinking about incongruities, anomalies, mishaps, caricatures and most of all play-acts while in secure conditions, insured by the pretence and by the experience of participation with who's listening/telling. Cognitivists and psychoanalysts agree on humorism. Smiling is possible.
In the second part, con