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Laughter is an attempted seduction or a lack of mentalisation, but also, as Freud points out, a liberation of energy that had hitherto been bound by defensive processes. But why must this energy be expelled? If laughter is a discharge of pleasure, it can also be an expulsion of destructive energy out of the mind and body. It thus acts as a system of regulation by evacuating one or the other drive energies in excess, providing a bonus of pleasure in both cases. Serving as a joyful marker of an economic reorganisation during the session, its eruption in a group of psychodrama helps certain patients to experience an affect from which they had previously been cut off.