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Why do we laugh? The answer, argued Freud in this groundbreaking study of humor, is that jokes, like dreams, satisfy our unconscious desires. The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious explains how jokes provide immense pleasure by releasing us from our inhibitions and allowing us to express sexual, aggressive, playful, or cynical instincts that would otherwise remain hidden. In elaborating this theory, Freud brings together a rich collection of puns, witticisms, one-liners, and anecdotes, which, as Freud shows, are a method of giving ourselves away.
Translated by Joyce Crick.
Introduction by John Carey.
As a whole, the papers emphasize the enormity and unparalleled originality of Freud's pre-analytic work, as well as its influence upon the subsequent development of psychoanalytic theory and technique. The collection offers a fascinating glimpse of the sheer range of ideas that have fed the psychoanalytic mind-set, and the links between psychoanalysis and a whole host of other disciplines.
'An extraordinary book'
(Andrew Marr, Start the Week )
This highly regarded, best-selling book provides a clear, well-organized, user-friendly overview of modern psychology, presenting the evolution of the schools of thought as a continuing story and illustrating their development within the social-intellectual climate of their times (the Zeitgeist) as well as their impact on one another. It personalizes the history of psychology, showing how events in the lives of the influential theorists, researchers, and teachers affected their ideas, approaches and methods. It also describes the rise and importance of applied psychology as a uniquely American form of psychology.
Paperback
In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpêtrière hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpêtrière identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"--they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.
