ABSTRACT
For Lacan, Freud’s book on jokes is not an instance of applied psychoanalysis. Nor is it an exploration of conceptually or technically adjunct aspects of analytic experience. Insofar as they engage the retroactive effects common to all punchlines, the punctuating cuts and scansions of analytic discourse induce momentary transformation of the economy of jouissance at stake in the treatment. When analytic discourse cracks the joke of interpretation, the phallus is functioning as the signifier of a lack. In such moments analyst and analysand are experiencing phallic jouissance. This chapter offers an introductory examination of how, over the course of Seminar V, Lacan’s reference to Freud’s analysis of jokes supports reformulation of the phallus as signifier. As such, the chapter proposes a reading of Freud’s text with renewed emphasis upon his articulation of three distinct yet linked dimensions – the joke, humor, and the comic – as fundamental registers of the clinical encounter.
