SOURCE: Brauner, David. “Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint.” Critical Review, no. 40 (2000): 75-90.
In the following essay, Brauner explores the comedic aspects of Portnoy's Complaint, contending that the novel is based on the unresolved tension between Roth's impulse “to treat psychoanalysis comically, and to treat comedy psychoanalytically.”
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