Humor In Therapy
There is laughter in therapy, which surprises many people. Especially in the psychoanalytic realm, there is an assumed image of the consulting room as a place of seriousness. In fact, laughter in a session is very frequently the most important thing that occurs in the hour.
A joke works as clinical material because it frequently slips by. Something that could not be said directly arrives sideways, naming something in a way that a plain statement could not. This is the same mechanism that sits behind slips of the tongue, and behind the odd logic of dreams. A person says the opposite of what they meant, or the wrong name, or something true they had no intention of saying, or delivers the message in a joke.
The fact that, in session, therapist and patient can laugh at it together is recognition that something got through. The therapist's job, however, is not just to be there to receive the message, but to also notice what the person is really saying between the lines.
Humor in Therapy: You Cannot Do It Alone
Something about the communication structure of humor in therapy requires a second person, someone who registers it. This is the very structure of a session: the patient speaks, and the therapist is at the receiving end, ready to catch what lies beneath the words.
Sometimes the joke is the most honest thing said, offered in the only form that felt survivable, yet the message is indeed serious. And, as a psychoanalyst, I take it seriously even when I laugh at it.
On Not Being Solemn
It is also important to say that there is a version of forced clinical seriousness that is actually empty heaviness: the therapist trying hard to maintain an unbroken expression. I do not think that is neutrality, but performance. That is not what serious clinical work means.
The ability to laugh at ourselves, or about something absurd (and a great deal of human life is absurd!) is a sign that the work has reached a different ground. People tend to arrive in treatment taking themselves with enormous gravity, their history a fixed and monumental thing. Later, sometimes, comes a lightness that was not possible before. The events did not change, but their weight did.
In the end, therapy is also about adding some comedy to our dramas.
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