23: Puns, Jokes, and Serious People feat. Ben Wurgaft

Abby and Patrick welcome intellectual historian, writer, editor, and noted wordsmith Ben Wurgaft. They talk about Ben’s experiences with long-term analysis and discuss ways of accessing low-cost options for psychoanalysis before collectively digging into Freud’s 1905 book on humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious – especially Freud’s jokes about beggars, millionaires, and salmon mayonnaise. They get into Freud’s hydraulic model of jokes as a release of pressure; Freud’s obsession ...