Tears of a Clown: Psychoanalytic Reflections on 
Comedy, Pathos, and Grievous Desire

Jed Sekoff, PhD, in discussion with Reyna Cowan, PsyD, LCSW

Friday, February 12, 6:30-8:30pm

It is often noted that analyzing comedy is the surest way to kill the joke. Perhaps it’s better to think the other way round: what can looking at the comic reveal about us? For one thing, we seem to thrive on incongruities—the reverse, the unexpected, the misaligned. Aggression ripples through the comedic, as does (per Freud) cathartic release of the repressed. From another angle, comedy may be a trenchant means of evoking intimacies. Love, friendship, and sexuality, as well as loneliness, confusion, and grief.
We will travel from Shakespeare to Chaplin to the “new comedy” of the “talkies.” From there the focus will be on auteurs of contemporary television who aim their tragic-comic gaze on the currents of what will be named, “Grievous Desire.”  Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Aisling Bea’s This Way Up will be our close companions, with a nod to Michaela Coel’s, I May Destroy You. Guest starring Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Melanie Klein, and D.W. Winnicott.