Humour and enjoyment are a strangely neglected part of the psychotherapy literature, treated in most training as something to manage rather than something to use.
The three books here take that gap seriously, each from a different angle. One makes a contemporary case for enjoyment itself, another is a broad edited handbook of clinical applications, and the third is a psychoanalytic collection on where humour actually sits in theory and technique.
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Why Don’t Psychotherapists Laugh?: Enjoyment and the Consulting Room
Ann Shearer, Routledge, 2016
Shearer draws on real stories from the consulting room, told by both therapists and clients, to show how humour and enjoyment can build a therapeutic relationship rather than distract from one. She works through how even the darkest humour can carry real psychological information, and what gets lost clinically when a therapist can’t bring enjoyment into the work at all.
Shearer is a Jungian analyst and former journalist based in London, and that dual background shows. The book is written for psychotherapists of any training rather than a specifically Jungian audience, and reads more like an extended argument than a technical manual.
Of the three books here, this is the most approachable entry point. It’s the only one written for clinicians across trainings rather than one school specifically.
The Handbook of Humor: Clinical Applications in Psychotherapy
Edited by Elcha Shain Buckman, Krieger, 1994
This is an edited handbook making the case that humour belongs in clinical practice as a deliberate tool, not just something that happens to occur in the room. It opens with a historical and theoretical review of the humour-in-psychotherapy literature, then works through specific populations and formats. These include adolescents, couples therapy, and Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers.
Buckman contributes two of the chapters herself, including one specifically on humour as a communication tool in couples’ work. The remaining population chapters come from other clinicians and researchers.
It’s the oldest and broadest book on this page, and some of the population-specific chapters reflect research and terminology from three decades ago. The range of settings it covers hasn’t been matched by anything more recent here.
Humor and Psyche: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Edited by James W. Barron, The Analytic Press, 1999
This collection makes the case that humour deserves serious psychoanalytic attention in its own right, not just as an aside to more “serious” clinical material. Ten chapters split into three sections: historical and theoretical perspectives on humour, its role within the therapeutic process itself, and its relationship to character and creativity.
That last section closes with three specific essays. One traces humour through Freud and Sándor Ferenczi’s 25-year correspondence, another looks at D. W. Winnicott’s comic spirit and theoretical innovations, and the third examines humour and creativity in the composer Charles Ives’s music.
This is squarely psychoanalytic in its frame, engaging directly with Freud’s own writing on jokes rather than treating it as settled history.I ts the entry here for readers with some psychoanalytic grounding already. The other two books assume less background and cover more ground across different kinds of practice.