Mentelin, Nancy

Humor, happiness, and guilt: A post-lockdown counterpoint with Fritz Zorn and Etty Hillesum - 2025.


76

Following Freud’s indictment of nursery rhymes in 1929, his partnership with Lou Andreas-Salomé presents a striking intellectual dissonance. Between happiness and guilt, the possibility of humor emerges as a third way—woven into the broader fabric of sublimation and drive renunciation: after the ordeals of lockdown, the idea of bringing together the writings of Fritz Zorn and Etty Hillesum places post-phallic psychic bisexuality at the heart of new compositions in the field of psychic conquests.