Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
12544
Lawrence J. Brown
37 Homer Street, Newton Centre, MA, USA larry.brown8@comcast.net
nonsense in jokes is made to serve the same aims of representation [as in dreams]
(Freud, 1905, p. 175)
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and
die.
(Mel Brooks)
an indefinable feeling . . . which I can best compare with an absence [the French
term], a sudden release of intellectual tension, and then all at once the joke is there
as a rule ready-clothed in words.
(1905, p. 167)
Unlike dreams which are mainly visual, the joke stays at the level of lan-
guage and aims to recover the old pleasure in nonsense (Freud, 1905,
p. 176) that triggered laughter in childhood. I suspect that a central part of
the verbal silliness in young children is the excitement over beginning to
master language and also the thrill of linking two objects together1 in ways
that are unusual for that child, which is often an expression of cleverness.
1
The word symbol derives from the Greek word symbolon that suggests throwing things together for con-
trast and comparison.
That the little boy or girl can evoke laughter in other children or adults
through this behavior adds another dimension of pleasure to these verbal
antics.2 I witnessed this recently when my 22 month-old granddaughter told
her first joke A, B, C, buttons3 which was delivered with a giggle that
evoked a response of infectious and absurd silliness in her family audience.
According to Freud, this is the long-forgotten childhood territory of verbal,
nonsensical zaniness which the joke revives.
However, on a deeper level, this first expression of joke-work likely
reaches down into my granddaughters preverbal (unformulated or unrepre-
sented) experiences having to do with emotions about separation and union
as though she was familiar with Freuds (1905) observation that nonsense
in jokes is made to serve the same aims of representation [as in dreams] (p.
175). She is putting together two seemingly unrelated concepts letters of
the alphabet and a button and this pairing may well serve the aim of rep-
resentation because the letters, though appearing to be individual elements,
hang together as part of a whole (the alphabet) and a button both fastens
objects together while also enabling their separation. My granddaughters
joke-work seems to be the equivalent in word play of Freuds (1915)
description of his 18 month-old grandsons fort-da (gone-there) game in
which the toddler made a toy on a string disappear by tossing it out of his
crib and then reeled it in gleefully to make it reappear: each of these grand-
children in their own way were developing symbolic strategies (one through
words and the other through action) to work through and represent early
experiences of separation and reunion.
the grimace characteristic of smiling, which twists up the corners of the mouth,
appears first in an infant at the breast when it is satisfied and satiated and lets go
of the breast as it falls asleep.
(p. 146, note 2)
Thus, Freud is suggesting that the capacity for laughter begins at the
dawn of psychological life with the babys first smile in response to the
pleasurable satisfaction of the infants hungry tension. Freuds emphasis
here is on the economic perspective (the building up and release of tension)
2
Trevarthen (2005) observes that parental failure to respond to the infants attempts to evoke pleasure
induces shame in the baby.
3
In effect this joke was employing a mechanism found in more sophisticated humor which offers a
judgment which produces a comic contrast (Freud, 1905, p. 10), that, in essence, says, Isnt it ridicu-
lous to think of A, B and C connected with buttons?
Bollas (1995) characterizes the mother as the First Clown to the infant
who, through her playful antics renders herself the Fool of the babys court,
thereby transforming the childs upset and distress into laughter; in essence
Laughing all our cares away, Just you and I.6 Lemma (1999) additionally
sees this interaction as a form of transformation, helping the baby digest
what it is unable to manage on its own. This mode of relating lays the
groundwork for the later capacity to modulate fear through laughing at
ones failings and gaining an appreciation of the human predicament, which
Poland (1990) considers the apogee of a mature sense of humor. This First
Clown mother is internalized and serves to buffer the baby against fears of
fragmentation by inducing laughter to enhance a sense of well-being and
integration. This internalized comforting presence was also addressed in
Freuds (1927) paper on humor which updated his Jokes book from the per-
spective of the structural theory. There he described how the superego may
comfort the injured ego by acting as though it was a benevolent loving par-
ent, which Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988) characterized as the capacity to be a
loving mother to oneself. Thus, these early experiences of shared laughter at
the edge of bearable excitement and the internalization of a mother/infant
digesting these potentially destabilizing states, what Bollas terms cracking
up together (1995, p. 243), establish an inner sense of well-being and help
inoculate the infant against fragmentation.
4
Freud, of course, did not use the words punch line since it is an English language term that came into
usage in the 1920s or 1930s, many years after his Jokes book.
5
See Kris (1938) and Jacobson (1946) regarding the dangers of overstimulation.
6
Lyrics from Chad and Jeremy, A Summer Song (1964).
7
Together with Anzieus (1993) notion of the skin ego, Bicks (1986) discussions of the importance of
skin in early object relations and Frances Tustins (1994) work on the rhythm of safety, the joke envelope
is a central element in this constellation of archaic organizers of the psyche-soma.
8
Perhaps this is one of the sources of humor underlying jokes of flatulence? These reach down into the
early unrepresented bodily experiences characterized by sound, the build-up of abdominal pressure and
subsequent discharge.
9
Rhode (2011) states that many Asperger children have a sense, albeit not always well developed, of
others having an inside in clear distinction from autistic children who lack this capacity.
In addition, the patient may have the sensory experience of a black hole
where a core self should exist due to this catastrophic rupture from the
mother.
Owing to the unique challenges that confront the Aspergers child, his
capacity for humor, especially the aptitude to tell a joke, is extremely lim-
ited. Their subjective experience of terror at separation from the mother
forecloses the growth of a shared potential space (Ogden, 1985; Winnicott,
1971) in which symbols may form, because distance from the mother (as in
having a separate mind) is felt as an existential threat. The failure of a
potential space to develop stands the child in a two-dimensional terrain that
lacks a third position (Britton, 1998) and thus there is no opportunity to
attain a comic perspective (Lemma, 1999). Additionally, empathy in
Aspergers children is limited due to the curtailment of their capacity to put
themselves in anothers shoes (as was the case literally of the boy mentioned
above). Furthermore, since the provenance of autistic phenomena is in the
earliest somato-psychic world of infancy, the first boundaries of the self as
10
An adult woman I (Brown, 1996) previously reported on, felt that she had neither an inside nor an
outside and that she was like a face on a pane of glass (p. 44). Separations from me reminded her of
burn patients with skin grafts: if the bandages were taken off too soon, the new skin would peel off with
the gauze.
unlike the Buddha who reacted with grief and compassion upon contact
with reality, Andrew, terrified and overwhelmed, desperately sought to keep
everything rigidly the same. For example, he was terrified of birthdays
because he feared growing up meant he would disappear and be unrecogniz-
able to himself and his parents.
Like many children and adults with Aspergers Syndrome, Andrew was
highly intelligent with areas of esoteric expertise that felt wooden and
pedantic for example, Andrew knew every imaginable detail about the
Titanic but lacked empathy for the human suffering of that tragedy.
How are we to understand this lack of empathy? The deficiencies in
empathy resulting from a limited ability to experience another mind as
separate and to tolerate ideas distinct from ones own are central factors,
but in my view there is another level to this enigma having to do with
the quality of representations, a topic of great current interest in contem-
porary analytic thinking.11 In a series of papers, Elizabeth and Elias da
Rocha Barros (2000, 2002, 2011, 2013, in press) have explored how
dream symbols (representations of affects) develop in complexity as indi-
cators of progress in analysis. In a recent paper,12 Elias da Rocha Bar-
ros (2013) stated that dream-work becomes an incubator of symbolic
forms which are products of what he and Elizabeth da Rocha Barros
(in press) call the expressive function of the mind. Following Langer
(1942), the Barroses distinguish between presentational symbolism, which
is expressive of emotions through intuitive processes that evoke affective
associations in the listener through projective identification, and discursive
symbolism which conveys objective meaning, that is, the dictionary defini-
tion, to the recipient.
I find the distinction between presentational and discursive symbolism to
be very helpful in understanding how the empathic or expressive function of
the mind of an Aspergers child operates. With regard to Andrew, his initial
communications were almost entirely discursive in nature: he amassed
descriptive facts about the Titanic that imparted much knowledge but he
was incapable of incubating presentational symbols by which to transmit
something of the affective human tragedy. His factual recounting of the
Titanic communicated little emotionally and felt more like a wall of discur-
sive bricks on which a stay out sign was plastered. Consequently, my ini-
tial reaction to his recitations of data was fascination which was followed
by boredom, but with no sense of terror or sadness about the catastrophe. I
am reminded of Bions (1992) description of dream images that are not true
symbols for the communication of affect, but are proto-symbols that serve
as vehicles for (evacuative) projective identification of unprocessed emo-
tional experience. Thus, Andrews use of evacuative projective identification
of discursive and proto-symbols added to other factors that precluded an
empathic response in me.
11
See Levine and Browns (2013) recent compendium of papers on this subject.
12
Paper given at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, December, 2013.
one breath, It was all over town get it? He fell back in a chair as we both
laughed, asked if Id like to hear another one, and when I nodded he
offered, What did the necktie say to the hat? I asked for a moment to
think about it, but he quickly told the punch line, again in one breath: Go
on ahead Ill hang around here get it? As the session drew to a close,
Andrew said hed like us to return to our play of planting and harvesting
potatoes and instructed that we were to dig holes, then plant seeds in them.
I said, Its very easy to grow potatoes, but its much harder to make a
human baby. Andrew said he once saw a picture of a baby before it was a
baby and it was like muscles together, it was just muscles. Then he told
me a funny story about a bird sitting on an egg and theres such a strong
wind that the egg got blown away six times; thus, the mother had to run
after it to sit on it again and again.
Apart from the fascinating content in this hour, we can see Andrews
growing capacity to represent his emotional experiences of loss, terror of
growing up and curiosity about how human existence comes into being.
However, at the outset of the session he was in a near psychotic state: run-
ning around the consulting room, having concretized his fear as unseen dust
to be whisked away, and falsely believing that he rode the school bus. This
evoked my recollecting his play of crashing school buses and also his earlier
association of birthdays with disappearing. It was at that moment that
Andrew asked if I wanted to hear the two jokes which seemed to have an
organizing effect in the session, partly as a manic defense (saying his birth-
day was at night), but also and perhaps more importantly, harnessing his
overstimulated state by engaging me as a modulating container to laugh
along with him. In addition, the content picked up on and expressed what
was happening in the session. The joke about the giant who threw up
seemed to capture Andrews psychic state of vomiting up his terror through
action and what Bion (1965) calls a transformation in hallucinosis (the invisi-
ble dust and believing he rode the school bus). The second joke was more
organized and appeared to represent the underlying theme of separation
and loss (you go on ahead), which segued into the latter part of the ses-
sion characterized by a higher symbolic level.
In the later portion of the hour immediately following the two jokes that
helped him manage the excitement and terror of his birthday, Andrew
regained his capacity for symbolic (presentational) forms and narrated a
fascinating story about prenatal life and the subsequent struggle to be born.
I had been thinking about how the entire hour was about growing and sur-
viving and so I said that its much harder to make a human baby to
which he responded by telling me that he had seen a picture of a baby in
utero and it was like muscles together. I found this comment to be very
poignant, conveying a phantasy of himself as formless, and the funny story
about the mother bird trying to nurture her egg which blew away six times
amplified my sad feeling. It was as though he was communicating the frag-
ile sense of his own existence and also, perhaps, some unconscious knowl-
edge of his mothers many miscarriages and difficulty getting pregnant.
In a meeting with his parents around this time, his father revealed that he
and Andrew had been reading a joke book together, the first I heard of
Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2016)
14 L. J. Brown
Translations of summary
La capacita di comprendere e usare lumorismo: Riflessioni sul lavoro con i bambini con la Sin-
drome di Asperger. La capacita di comprendere e usare lumorismo e un evento interpersonale comp-
lesso che dipende da fasi maturative e dallaver raggiunto certi livelli evolutivi che sono assenti o poco
sviluppati nei bambini con la Sindrome di Asperger. Queste pietre miliari evolutive includono la capacita
di conoscere la mente di un altro, un senso del tempo interpersonale e, in particolare, la capacita di pen-
siero astratto. Lautore esamina il concetto freudiano (1905)di lavoro dellumorismo, che e simile al
lavoro onirico, essendo entrambi dei percorsi verso la formazione delle rappresentazioni mentali. Freud
considera il lavoro dellumorismo unattivita mentale effettuata sul piano verbale e lautore esamina le
dimensioni preverbali che affondano le radici nelle relazioni precoci tra madre e bambino. Si propone la
discussione estesa del trattamento psicoanalitico di un bambino con la Sindrome di Asperger per illus-
trare questi temi e per dimostrare come il lavoro dellumorismo possa costituire una piattaforma su cui
fondare le rappresentazioni mentali.
La capacidad de contar chistes: Reflexiones a partir del trabajo con nin ~ os con sndrome de
Asperger. La capacidad de contar chistes es un acto interpersonal altamente complejo que depende de
la consecuci on de ciertos logros del desarrollo que estan ausentes o muy disminuidos en ni~ nos con
sndrome de Asperger. Entre estos esta la capacidad de conocer la mente del otro, un sentido del
momento interpersonal propicio y, sobre todo, la capacidad de pensamiento abstracto. El autor discute
la nocion de trabajo del chiste de Freud (1905), que es parecida al trabajo del sue~
no, y ambas vas para
la formacion de representaciones mentales. Freud consideraba el trabajo del chiste como una actividad
mental que operaba a nivel verbal, y el autor examina las dimensiones preverbales que se originan en las
m as tempranas interacciones madre/bebe. Para ilustrar estos puntos y mostrar la actividad del trabajo
del chiste como un medio de construcci on de representaciones mentales, se presenta una amplia dis-
cusion del tratamiento psicoanaltico de un ni~
no con Asperger.
References
Anzieu D (1993). Autistic phenomena and the skin ego. Psychoanal Inq 13:4248.
Bick E (1968). The experience of skin in early object-relations. Int J Psychoanal 49:484486.
Bick E (1986). Further considerations on the function of the skin in early object relations. Br J
Psychother 2:292299.
Bion W (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac (extended 1994 version).
Bollas C (1995). Cracking up. In: Cracking up: The work of unconscious experience. New York: Hill
and Wang.
Britton R (1998). Belief and Imagination. London: Routledge.
Brown L (1985). On concreteness. Psa Rev 72:379402.
Brown LJ (1996). A proposed demography of the representational world. Melanie Klein & Obj Rels
14:2160.
Brown L (1996).
Caper R (2000). Immaterial facts. New York: Jason Aronson.
Cavett D (2013). Missing: Jonathan Winters. Badly. New York Times, May 10.
Chad & Jeremy (1964). Summer Song.
Chasseguet-Smirgel J (1988). The triumph of humor. In: Bloom HP, Kramer Y, Richards AD, editors.
Fantasy, myth and reality: Essays in honor of Jacob A. Arlow. Madison, CT: International UP.
Ferro A (2009). Mind works: Technique and creativity in psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge.
Freud S (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE 4-5.
Freud S (1905). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE 8.
Freud S (1915). Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, September 1. 1915. The
Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, Vol. 2, 19141919, p. 77.
Freud S (1927). Humour. SE 21:161166.