2009-11-17
Explanation
This comic shows a woman on a therapist's couch describing a dream to her psychoanalyst: "I had this dream where I was a huge elongated tube traveling down a narrow shaft." The psychoanalyst gets visibly excited and asks: "Really?! Did you have a sort of cold sensation?!" The woman continues, playing along: "Freezing! Like a physical embodiment of the lost connection with my mother!" The caption below reads: "Psychoanalysts: Easiest group to screw with since 1895."
The joke targets Freudian psychoanalysis and its tendency to find sexual symbolism in everything. The woman's dream description -- a "huge elongated tube traveling down a narrow shaft" -- is deliberately loaded with imagery that a Freudian analyst would interpret as sexual. But instead of being a genuine dream, the patient is clearly fabricating details to toy with the analyst, feeding him exactly the kind of symbolism (phallic imagery, mother issues, physical sensations) that Freudian theory hungers for. The date 1895 references the approximate period when Freud began publishing his theories on dream interpretation and psychoanalysis.
The votey panel shows a mock letter: "Dear Zach, Psychoanalysis is a real science! Watch -- I can add the prefix 'neuro' to it: neuropsychoanalysis. Bam! Sincerely, The Internet. PS: So are neuro-Buddhism, neuro-alchemy, and neuro-cartooning." This extends the joke by satirizing the trend of adding "neuro" as a prefix to give dubious fields a veneer of scientific legitimacy.