ABSTRACT
Because it belongs principally to the spirit of thought, and because the range of its manifestations can scarcely be reduced to a mechanism, humour does not offer metapsychology the same decisive holds as the joke. If Freud returned to it in a short article of 1927, it was probably because he was not satisfied with what he had said about it in his formidable work of 1905, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; but it was mainly because he had a precise reason for doing so: he wanted to show that the point of view of the second topography made it possible to account for it in terms of the ‘contribution made to the comic through the agency of the Superego’ (1927, 165). When I was asked to participate in this edition of Libres Cahiers, I thought at first that I had nothing to add to the article I had already published in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse: ‘L’Humoriste et sa croyance’ (Donnet, 1997). But I recalled the joy I had had writing that paper, in spite of the formidable obstacles encountered. It is true that, as humour is a theme that touches me closely, 1 I had deeply identified with Freud. So I yielded to the temptation to revisit it, telling myself that, at the very least, I would be able to clarify certain formulations that were previously too condensed.
