The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and worship him as our patron saint’. And so they did. (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 15)

        Aside from its all-too-familiar and perhaps even universal juxtaposition of violence with reverence, what, amongst the countless of Burckhardt’s vignettes, marks this one in particular as both mythic and tragic is, ironically but not too surprisingly, the hefty quotient of laughter its recounting often evokes. At another time and in another place, Franz Kafka’s reading of his own quasi-mythic tales of humanity’s despair and absurdity elicited a similar laughter from his Prague audiences; ditto of the response of many a theatregoer to the performance of Ionesco’s despairing La cantatrice chauve. Let us not forget Emily Dickinson, that mistress of suffering, who could not but delight in the humorous nuances of certain stories of death and decapitation.

        One could easily argue, as many already have, that operative in these and most other comic responses is a concealment of and a shield against the poignancy, if not the pain, of the myth and its truth, that, in other words, the laughter is the very confirmation of what it tries to deny. With pain as the normatively posited response, no psychoanalytic clinician or theorist, to my knowledge at least, has entertained the possibility of a reverse and yet equally vital scenario whereby laughter is the target of concealment and tears are its limpid and unadorned but no less obscuring cover.

        And yet, throughout much of its history, psychoanalysis has rightly insisted on the inherently conflicted relationship a subject has with its object. Freud considered the perversions as always paired in the individual: sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not simply the terms we attach to the separate but presumably complementary roles we adopt in our sexual scenarios, they are co-extensive components of our identities as desiring subjects. As much can be said of femininity and masculinity for what Freud had termed primary “bisexuality” in his Three Essays of 1905 is better captured in our current lexicon as primary “bigenderism.” Klein made the case for a similar dynamic, though hers were much starker terms: sexuality and aggression, love and hate, are our inexhaustible rudiments and much of what we know of the unconscious and its positions is articulated through the ways in which the two are lived and negotiated. As for Lacan, that master of the triad wherever registers, passions, and diagnoses were concerned, he too insisted on the co-valence of the oppositional pair whenever he addressed technical questions of presence and absence, speech and silence, inside and outside,

        Puzzling then is the psychoanalytic refusal to detect anything other than the tortured and tragic in the myth of Oedipus as its founding principle. Puzzling is the discipline’s refusal to grant its hermeneutic key access to its much-treasured logic of duality and opposition, a logic that would uncover in the Oedipal script its constitutive roots in the humorous. No doubt, the clinical commitment to the alleviation of human suffering has often left little room for the consideration of anything other than the stifling and the traumatic. Indeed, there has been much seductive sense to the argument that the time for laughter and, in this case, personal freedom, is possible only after the working through of blockages and inhibitions has been accomplished. (It is worth noting here that such a working through is as much collective and cultural, considering the environment of concrete violence and destruction we inhabit, as it is individual.)