“I’ve won at life.” That’s what went through my head when I landed at Zurich airport. Automatically, in my imagination, I already had people’s respect for having moved to Europe, but almost no one knew I had gone, and those who did didn’t know the whole story: I was going, bag and baggage, to live with someone I had only known for 17 days. It seemed crazy… but then, why did I go? I didn’t know at that moment, I only knew I needed to go, even though I was afraid. Today I know: I went for love. But not for love of the other person, but for love of myself and my deepest desires. I accepted life calling me to build my own story, and I knew, I simply felt, that my path would lead there. With him. This book is about being a woman. It’s about an intercultural relationship. It’s about dying and being reborn many times. But, above all, it’s about us, who are and have the soul of an immigrant.

Who said a psychoanalyst can’t have a red nose, even if symbolic? In The Tragicomedy of the Soul, Nadja Moraes, psychoanalyst, clown, and specialist in laughing at her own stumbles, challenges the seriousness of clinics and proposes: what if laughter is a shortcut to the unconscious? Amid Freudian jokes, existential falls, and patients who liberate themselves with mockery, Nadja mixes theory and experience with the lightness of someone who has learned that a good clown is one who listens before making jokes. Here, shame becomes a springboard, drama gains comic timing, and suffering enters the scene… but exits with a red nose. The author structures her method based on her theoretical background in psychoanalysis and real stories of the revelatory power of humor on the couch. More than a manual, the book is a map for analysts and analysands to get in touch with the truth (even if comic) they carry within themselves. A work that makes psychoanalysis slip on its own banana peel — and, surprisingly, be grateful for it.