Humor in group psychotherapy

Abstract

It is interesting that something as omnipresent in human behavior as humor has been so neglected in the therapeutic literature. It may be that when a parallel is drawn between adult forms of humor and children's play a red flag goes up in technological-industrial cultures, where is held in high esteem and play appears to be its antithesis. As the industrial revolution gained momentum, explanations of human behavior (both biological and psychological) tended to be sober and pragmatic. Darwinian theory underlies much scholarly thinking. Behavior is understood in terms of its direct value for the organism's survival in a given context. Since there is no apparent value of play to human survival, investigators of play or humor risk having their seen as nonsubstantive. An additional complication for investigators is the existing mythology that shapes our views of childhood. Despite considerable economic and sexual exploitation of children (particularly virulent during the early days of the industrial revolution), childhood maintains its aura as a time of innocence and ease. Freud (1960), a man both ahead of his time and in it, paints this picture of the idyllic nature of childhood: Jokes and humor then provide the adult with an euphoria which is nothing other than the mood of a period of in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical in general with a small expenditure of energy the mood of our childhood, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life (p. 236). Freud felt that play was largely confined to childhood, because, as the faculty of reasonableness strengthened, it destroyed the premise for play. He hypothesized that jokes serve the clandestine purpose of continuing pleasurable play because they are protections against the criticism of reason and serve to inhibit critical judgment. Play and humor enter the dialectic between the pleasure and reality principles as rebels against the compulsions of reality. Perhaps the implication is that humor, a form of play, helps us to bear the great weight of the real world. But Freud did not honor humor along with work and love as the things which give human meaning.