Jokes: Their Purpose and Meaning

In the tradition of Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Herbert Strean has presented an incisive examination of jokes as a form of emotional communication of our deepest anxieties and most basic conflicts and impulses. He lucidly illustrates how, through the medium of jokes, we are permitted safe, if indirect, expression of our erotic and perverse wishes, our hostile and defiant attitudes toward authority, our needs to deprecate those we perceive as superior, our stake in the war of the sexes, and our gratification in depicting religious figures (and therapists) as all too humanly succumbing to the temptations of lust and avarice. The jokes Dr. Strean presents and discusses are those concerned with the basic life situations that are inevitably characterized by ambivalence and conflict. Thus they constitute the principal material of psychotherapy.