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.