“You get me”: a three-paper research project exploring how trainee psychotherapists experience and understand humour in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with young people in the context of professional training programmes

This doctoral thesis explores the experience and understanding of humour in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with young people, focusing on how trainee psychotherapists encounter and make sense of humour in clinical practice. Comprising three interlinked papers, the research addresses a notable gap in psychotherapeutic literature, where humour is often overlooked or instrumentalised rather than studied as a lived, relational phenomenon. The first paper presents a literature review that critically analyses how humour is conceptualised across historical and theoretical paradigms - identified as Superiority, Relief, Humility, and Play - highlighting humour’s complex ontological status in psychotherapy. The review finds that while humour is widely present in therapeutic settings, its experiential and intersubjective dimensions remain under-theorised and insufficiently researched. Building on this foundation, the second paper uses interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine in-depth interviews with five trainee child and adolescent psychotherapists. This analysis reveals that humour often arises spontaneously in therapy sessions, accompanying moments of emotional resonance, therapeutic change, and mutual recognition. However, trainees frequently struggle to integrate these experiences into formal clinical discourse, citing uncertainty about humour’s legitimacy as clinical data. The third paper employs framework analysis to investigate how these trainees understand their experiences of humour. Findings indicate diverse explanatory models, shaped by personal, theoretical, and institutional influences, which often leave humour marginalised or ambiguously positioned within psychotherapy training. The thesis concludes that humour, as an emergent and co-created experience, can foster therapeutic engagement, creativity, and transformation. However, its marginal status reflects deeper tensions in psychotherapeutic training and practice about what constitutes valid clinical material. This research contributes to psychoanalytic knowledge by advocating for greater recognition of humour as a meaningful and potentially therapeutic phenomenon, and by offering a nuanced framework for understanding its place in the psychoanalytic encounter with young people.