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Anxious laughter: Mauron’s Renversement and Gogol’s Overcoat

Anxious laughter: Mauron’s Renversement and Gogol’s Overcoat Inside and outside of psychoanalysis, laughter has often been thought of as relating to anxiety, with the usual line being that laughter can be a response to anxiety or a way of dealing with it. This article argues that laughter cannot be said to eradicate or ‘deal with’ anxiety and that laughter is always unsettling precisely because it contains anxiety and indicates its continuing threat. The article discusses Freud and Lacan on anxiety, as well as Charles Mauron, an understudied writer whose Psychocritique du Genre Comique was the only sustained study of psychoanalysis and comedy until very recently. I argue here that Mauron’s idea of renversement holds a key to understanding the relationship between laughter and anxiety. Rather than using a collection of isolated examples to illustrate individual points, in the second half of the article I provide a more sustained discussion of these ideas in relation to Nicolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The American Journal of Psychoanalysis Springer Journals

Anxious laughter: Mauron’s Renversement and Gogol’s Overcoat

Bown, Alfie
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis , Volume 77 (2) – May 4, 2017
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References (42)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
Subject
Psychology; Clinical Psychology; Psychotherapy; Psychoanalysis
ISSN
0002-9548
eISSN
1573-6741
DOI
10.1057/s11231-017-9085-6
pmid
28473701
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Inside and outside of psychoanalysis, laughter has often been thought of as relating to anxiety, with the usual line being that laughter can be a response to anxiety or a way of dealing with it. This article argues that laughter cannot be said to eradicate or ‘deal with’ anxiety and that laughter is always unsettling precisely because it contains anxiety and indicates its continuing threat. The article discusses Freud and Lacan on anxiety, as well as Charles Mauron, an understudied writer whose Psychocritique du Genre Comique was the only sustained study of psychoanalysis and comedy until very recently. I argue here that Mauron’s idea of renversement holds a key to understanding the relationship between laughter and anxiety. Rather than using a collection of isolated examples to illustrate individual points, in the second half of the article I provide a more sustained discussion of these ideas in relation to Nicolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.”

Journal

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis – Springer Journals

Published: May 4, 2017

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