ABSTRACT
S. Freud included humour with those aspects of everyday life to which he tried to bring psychoanalytic understanding: dreams, mistakes, day-dreams, literature, and religion. The paper "Humour" gives one of the clearest of his accounts of the relationship of the ego with the superego. The chapter distinguishes between three uses of humour: protecting the ego, consoling it, and attacking it. The principal characters were the "internal parents" composing the superego: they, like parents in the child's external world, could be the internal sources of comfort and joy, persecution and fear, or guilt and despair. Freud makes clear that the superego takes an amused and tolerant view of the immature ego—how does that fit with author suggestion? The chapter proposes that it does so by a joining up of the self-reflective ego with the observant superego, not, for once, in self-castigation but in amusement at witnessing the great discrepancy between the ego-ideal of aspiration and the inept ego of performance.
