Who’s Afraid of a Good Ole Chuckle? Psychoanalysis and Comedy in the Analytical Setting

When: August 5th, 2026 from 7PM to 9PM (Vancouver, BC)

Where: SFU Woodwards/Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Room 2205 (Hybrid event)

Please register HERE.

Free Event for Corpo Freudiano members. For all others, CFV suggests a donation of $25-50 per person to help us keep hosting events like this one.

Comedy has never been taken as seriously as it is nowadays. Although Freud did write a book on jokes as witty formations of the unconscious, the weight that laughter has within the clinical space hasn’t been all too welcoming for so-called “neutral” clinicians. In Freudian terms, jokes are supposed to be a pleasure-seeking unconscious formation that also offers a form of relief, but nowadays, this seems to have taken the shape of its opposite: it is an anxiety-producing event for the subject not only telling the joke, but also the one that dares to laugh at it. By delving into the scope of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and following more recent studies on the depths of comedy in contemporary psychoanalysis, I will argue for the importance of comedy within the analytical setting as an additional form of intervention, especially when dealing with obsessive neurosis.

Biography: Alejandro Cerda-Rueda is a Mexican psychoanalyst practicing in Mexico City. He obtained his doctorate from the European Graduate School (Switzerland) under the supervision of Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek. Postgraduate professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) as well as visiting professor at the Sociedad Freudiana de la Ciudad de México (SFCM). Published Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy (Routledge, 2016), En la penumbra del sujeto (Prometeo, 2020), and recently compiled with Christina Soto Van der Plas, Reversals of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Work of Alenka Zupančič (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). Currently he is working on the upcoming book: A Witch Metapsychology: Apropos Psychoanalysis and the Outcome of Freud’s Legacy. Recipient of the Andrew Mellon Grant to participate in the international co-research program Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South (2019-2022). Since 2009, he founded and has served as senior editor at Paradiso editores.