How to Laugh Your Way Through Life

A Psychoanalyst's Advice

Paul Marcus

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English

Karnac Books
01 May 2013

Psychoanalytical theory (Freudian psychology)

While living in anti-Semitic Vienna, Freud wrote in a letter to Ernest Jones, 'What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.' Tragicomic attunement-seeing the comic in the tragic and the tragic in the comic-is a perspective on life that, following Freud, is one of the best ways to 'to ward off possible suffering' and better manage the stressors, anxieties, and worries of everyday life. Moreover, tragicomic attunement and intervention has a meaning-giving, affect-integrating, life-affirming, double structure that is especially pertinent to sensible living in our troubled and troubling post-modern world: 'In tragedy', said theologian Harvey Cox, 'we weep and are purged. In comedy we laugh and hope.' In Monty Python's Life of Brian, a bunch of crucified criminals happily sing 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'; In Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, the central character thinks about a joke he heard once. As a man is about to be executed, the firing squad officer in charge offers the man about to be shot a cigarette. He replies, 'No thanks, I'm trying to quit.' It is precisely this capacity to use one's imaginative resources to create a tragicomic 'form of life', a way of thinking, feeling, and acting in the service of aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical deepening, of affirming Beauty, Truth and, especially, Goodness, that mainly constitutes the art of living the 'good life.' In chapters on love, work, suffering, death, and psychoanalysis, the author shows how the 'nuts and bolts' of tragicomic attunement and intervention can be cultivated and used to help people better manage the harshness, if not outrageousness, of life, as well as more deeply engage its beauty and nobility. Unlike most books on the psychology and philosophy of humour, and following Ludwig Wittgenstein's wonderful advice-'A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes,' this book is replete with jokes, humorous stories, and amusing maxims and quotes making it a lively reading experience that aims to help people fashion the 'good life'-a life of deep and expansive love, creative and productive work, that is aesthetically pleasing and in accordance with reason and ethics. As tragicomic master Mel Brooks noted, 'Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you,' and becoming more attuned to its dynamics and applications in everyday life is the art of living the 'good life'.

By: Paul Marcus
Imprint: Karnac Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 230mm, Width: 147mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781780490953
ISBN 10: 178049095X
Pages: 170
Publication Date: 01 May 2013
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paul Marcus, PhD, is a supervising and training analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of 'Being for The Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis; Autonomy in the Extreme Situation: Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps, and the Mass Society' and 'Ancient Religious Wisdom, Spirituality and Psychoanalysis', among other books. Dr Marcus is married with two children and lives in Great Neck, New York.

Reviews for How to Laugh Your Way Through Life: A Psychoanalyst's Advice

"'Paul Marcus has hit the nail on the head - or should I say the nerve of the heart, a heart that is ticklish. This is a beautiful book showing the tragicomic richness of humour as part of life, as aid to living, as opener of soul dimensions, and affirming of everyday life touched by transcendence. He takes us on a tour of humour in psychoanalysis, culture, life and death in many modes, adding to our appreciation of who we are and what life is. I laughed and cried and learned through the ways that truth and love and fun can tickle, touch and enlighten.'- Michael Eigen, PhD, author of Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis and Contact with the Depths'Beautifully blending insights from psychology and sociology, Marcus has convinced me that embracing a ""tragicomic vision"", as he calls it, is an essential quality of mind if we are to prevail amidst the many difficulties of everyday life. Filled with poignant and humorous examples, this book was a pleasure to read and learn from.'- William B. Helmreich, PhD, Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, and author of The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles to Understand a City"