ABSTRACT
As Anna Freud first showed people, a communication through humour always springs spontaneously from the unconscious and, although it initially engages them at that level, the whole experience quickly comes to life in their conscious awareness. The primary libidinal and destructive forces within people are themselves indestructible. The practice of psychoanalysis is concerned not only with elucidating the meaning of contrary psychic positions and related conflicts, but also with uncovering, containing and better integrating the forces involved, both within the analysand and the analyst. A reasonably mature sense of humour seems to require a broadened view of the self, i.e., one that takes the individual beyond the primitive anxieties and the stage of secondary narcissism. Freud was interested in the nature of Jewish humour even before the end of last century. A dream is more disguised and tends to take over a passive ego, whereas a joke has more intentionality, as it were, and is less disguised.
