In its playfulness, the interpretation also matched the quality of the clinical issue itself:
regression and infantile modes of thought.
It is as if the analyst intuitively and instantaneously tapped into what Kris (1940) described as “the pleasure-gain from regression,
[which] shows us that the adult requires a certain cathexis to curb in himself . . . the primary process,
which breaks through in the infantile modes of thought contained in the comic of adults” (p. 318).
It is this level of sophistication, possible only in humor, that renders it such a powerful intervention.