Wit and its relation to the unconscious
Part 20
Economy of sympathy is one of the most frequent sources of humoristic pleasure. Mark Twain’s humor usually follows this mechanism. When he tells us about the life of his brother, how, as mi employee in a large road-building enterprise, he was hurled into the air through a premature explosion of a blast, to come to earth again far from the place where he was working, feelings of sympathy for this unfortunate are invariably aroused in us. We should like to inquire whether he sustained no injury in this accident; but the continuation of the story that the brother lost a half-day’s pay for being away from the place he worked diverts us entirely from sympathy and makes us almost as hard-hearted as that employer, and just as indifferent to the possible injury to the victim’s health. Another time Mark Twain presents us his pedigree, which he traces back almost as far back as one of the companions of Columbus. But after describing the character of this ancestor, whose entire possessions consisted of several pieces of linen each bearing a different mark, we cannot help laughing at the expense of the stored-up piety, a piety which characterized our frame of mind at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of humoristic pleasure is not disturbed by our knowing that this family history is a fictitious one, and that this fiction serves a satirical tendency to expose the embellishments which result in imparting such pedigrees to others; it is just as independent of the conditions of reality as the manufactured comic. Another of Mark Twain’s stories relates how his brother constructed for himself subterranean quarters into which he brought a bed, a table, and a lamp, and that as a roof he used a large piece of sail-cloth with a hole through the centre; how during the night after the room was completed, a cow being driven home fell through the opening in the ceiling on to the table and extinguished the lamp; how his brother helped patiently to hoist the animal out and to rearrange everything; how he did the same thing when the same disturbance was repeated the following night; and then every succeeding night; such a story becomes comical through repetition. But Mark Twain closes with the information that in the forty-sixth night when the cow again fell through, his brother finally remarked that the thing was beginning to grow monotonous; and here we can no longer restrain our humoristic pleasure, for we had long expected to hear how the brother would express his anger over this chronic _malheur_. The slight humor which we draw from our own life we usually produce at the expense of anger instead of irritating ourselves.[82]
_Forms of Humor_
The forms of humor are extraordinarily varied according to the nature of the emotional feelings which are economized in favor of humor, as sympathy, anger, pain, compassion, etc. And this series seems incomplete because the sphere of humor experiences a constant enlargement, as often as an artist or writer succeeds in mastering humoristically the, as yet, unconquered emotional feelings and in making them, through artifices similar to those in the above example, a source of humoristic pleasure. Thus the artists of _Simplicissimus_ have worked wonders in gaining humor at the expense of fear and disgust. The manifestations of humor are above all determined by two peculiarities, which are connected with the conditions of its origin. In the first place, humor may appear fused with wit or any other form of the comic; whereby it is entrusted with the task of removing a possible emotional development which would form a hindrance to the pleasurable effect. Secondly, it can entirely set aside this emotional development or only partially, which is really the more frequent case, because the simpler function and the different forms of “broken”[83] humor, results in that humor which smiles under its tears. It withdraws from the affect a part of its energy and gives instead the accompanying humoristic sound.
As may be noticed by former examples the humoristic pleasure gained by entering into sympathy with a thing results from a special technique resembling displacement through which the liberation of affect held ready is disappointed and the energy occupation is deflected to other, and, not often, to secondary matters. This does not help us, however, to understand the process by which the displacement from the development of affect proceeds in the humoristic person himself. We see that the recipient intimates the producer of the humor in his psychic processes, but we discover nothing thereby concerning the forces which make this process possible in the latter.
We can only say, when, for example, somebody succeeds in paying no heed to a painful affect because he holds before himself the greatness of the world’s interest as a contrast to his own smallness, that we see in this no function of humor but one of philosophic thinking, and we gain no pleasure even if we put ourselves into his train of thought. The humoristic displacement is therefore just as impossible in the light of conscious attention as is the comic comparison; like the latter it is connected with the condition to remain in the foreconscious—that is to say, to remain automatic.
One reaches some solution of humoristic displacement if one examines it in the light of a defense process. The defense processes are the psychic correlates of the flight reflex and follow the task of guarding against the origin of pain from inner sources; in fulfilling this task they serve the psychic function as an automatic adjustment, which finally proves harmful and therefore must be subjected to the control of the conscious thinking. A definite form of this defense, the failure of repression, I have demonstrated as the effective mechanism in the origin of the psychoneuroses. Humor can now be conceived as the loftiest variant of this defense activity. It disdains to withdraw from conscious attention the ideas which are connected with the painful affect, as repression does, and thus it overcomes the defense automatism. It brings this about by finding the means to withdraw the energy resulting from the liberation of pain which is held in readiness and through discharge changes the same into pleasure. It is even credible that it is again the connection with the infantile that puts at humor’s disposal the means for this function. Only in childhood did we experience intensively painful affects over which to-day as grown-ups we would laugh; just as a humorist laughs over his present painful affects. The elevation of his ego, of which humoristic displacement gives evidence,—the translation of which would read: I am too big to have these causes affect me painfully—he could find in the comparison of his present ego with his infantile ego. This conception is to some extent confirmed by the rôle which falls to the infantile in the neurotic processes of repression.
_The Relation of Humor to Wit and Comic_
On the whole humor is closer to the comic than wit. Like the former its psychic localization is in the foreconscious, whereas wit, as we had to assume, is formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the foreconscious. On the other hand, humor has no share in the peculiar nature in which wit and the comic meet, a peculiarity which perhaps we have not hitherto emphasized strongly enough. It is a condition for the origin of the comic that we be induced to apply—either _simultaneously_ or in rapid succession—to the same thought function two different modes of ideas, between which the “comparison” then takes place and thus forms the comic difference. Such differences originate between the expenditure of the stranger and one’s own, between the usual expenditure and the emergency expenditure, between an anticipated expenditure and one which has already occurred.[84]
The difference between two forms of conception resulting simultaneously, which work with different expenditures, comes into consideration in wit, in respect to the hearer. The one of these two conceptions, by taking the hints contained in the witticism, follows the train of thought through the unconscious, while the other conception remains on the surface and presents the witticism like any wording from the foreconscious which has become conscious. Perhaps it would not be considered an unjustified statement if we should refer the pleasure of the witticism heard to the difference between these two forms of presentation.
Concerning wit we here repeat our former statement concerning its Janus-like double-facedness, a simile we used when the relation between wit and the comic still appeared to us unsettled.[85]
The character thus put into the foreground becomes indistinct when we deal with humor. To be sure, we feel the humoristic pleasure where an emotional feeling is evaded, which we might have expected as a pleasure usually belonging to the situation; and in so far humor really falls under the broadened conception of the comic of expectation. But in humor it is no longer a question of two different kinds of presentations having the same content; the fact that the situation comes under the domination of a painful emotional feeling which should have been avoided, puts an end to possible comparison with the nature in the comic and in wit. The humoristic displacement is really a case of that different kind of utilization of a freed expenditure which proved to be so dangerous for the comic effect.
_Formulæ for Wit, Comic, and Humor_
Now, that we have reduced the mechanism of humoristic pleasure to a formula analogous to the formula of comic pleasure and of wit, we are at the end of our task. It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from an _economy of expenditure in inhibition_, of the comic from an _economy of expenditure in thought_, and of humor from an _economy of expenditure in feeling_. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity. For the euphoria which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy.
INDEX
A
Abstract wit, 128
Absurdity, 77
Actuality, 186
Æsthetics, vi
Agassiz, 54
Aggression, 138, 152, 160, 232
Alluring-premiums, 210
Allusions, 107, 108, 232
Ambiguity, 45
Ambitious impulse, 219
Application of same material, 49
Aristotle, 184
Attributions, 121
Automatic process, 238
Automatisms, 85, 86, 87, 235, 358
B
Bain, 226, 322
Bergson, 301, 337, 360
Blasphemous witticisms, 171
Bleuler, 278
_Bonmot_, 43
Brevity, 10, 29, 52, 243
Brill, 22, 31, 35, 37, 38, 56
C
Caricature, 280, 303, 320
Censor, 260
Characterization-wit, 71
Child, 190, 309, 362
Childhood, 149
Comic, 4, 10, 221, 287, 313 element, 88 façade, 236 its origin, 302 its psychogenesis, 360 of expectation, 317 of imitation, 336
Comic, of speech, 345 motion, 304 pleasure, its origin, 351 situations, 303, 314
Comical character, 277
Comparison, 113 with unification, 130
Composition, 31
Condensation, 20, 48 examples of, 21, 22, 23 in dreams, 31, 49, 256 with modification and substitution, 25
Conflict, 163
Contrast, 8
Critical witticisms, 171
Cynical tendency, 204 witticisms and self-criticism, 166
Cynicism, 65, 161 pessimistic, 170
D
Darwin, 226
Defence, 138 reaction, 142
Derision, 157
De Quincey, 22
Disguise, 303
Displacement, 67, 61, 161 in dreams, 256
Displacement-wit, 68, 71, 237
Don Quixote, 377
Double meaning, 40, 103 and displacement, 66 of a name, 41
Doubt in witty comparisons, 118
Dream-formation, 260
Dream-work, 249, 275
Dreams, 30, 250, 251
Dugas, 224, 242
E
Economy, 49, 52, 242, 245 of psychic expenditure, 180
Ehrenfels, 165
Exaggeration, 280
Exhibitionism, 142
F
Façade, 155, 158
Facetious questions, 238
Falke, 14, 80, 95
Falstaff, Sir John, 376
Faulty thinking, 81, 84
Fechner, 188, 207, 280
Fischer, 3, 4, 6, 11, 43, 47, 55, 89, 132, 136
Flaubert, 24
Foreconscious, 282
Fore-pleasure, 209, 211
G
Goethe, 133
Grim-humor, 372
Groos, 183, 184, 185, 195
Gross, 278
H
Harmless wit, 128, 211, 219, 222, 284 and tendency-wit, 130
Heine, 9, 15, 26, 43, 44, 47, 55, 57, 92, 94, 106, 109, 119, 122, 171, 215, 216, 223, 341
Heymans, 9, 215
Holmes, 37
Hugo, 373
Humor, 370 Mark Twain’s, 374
I
Imitations, 303, 322
Impulse to impart wit, 200
Indirect expression, 100 with allusion, 101
Infantile and the comic, 364
Inhibitions, 140, 197, 206, 230, 231, 236, 290 expenditure of, 180
Insults, 209
Invectives, 148, 277
Ironical wit, 100
Irony, 276
J
Jest, 197, 201, 211, 274, 284
Johnson, 45
Jokes, cynical, 164 good or poor, 182 Jewish, 59, 72, 97, 166, 218 smutty, 139, 140, 145, 233
K
Kant, 320
Kleinpaul, 198
Kraepelin, 7
L
Lassalle, 115
Laugh, 221
Laughter as a discharge, 228 its determination, 224, 226
Lessing, 97, 130
Libido, 141
Lichtenberg, 39, 78, 89, 95, 97, 104, 115, 118, 121, 122, 129, 132, 149, 218
Lipps, 3, 4, 6, 10, 30, 93, 215, 227, 254, 320, 326
M
Manifold application, 40, 45
Matthews, 44
Michelet, 78
Modification, 42
Moll, 141
Morality, 163
Motives, 214, 239
N
Naïve, 290 characteristics of, 295 examples of, 291
Negativism, 276
Nestroy, 120, 341
Nonsense, 72, 192, 200, 279
Nonsense-witticisms, 76
O
Obscene wit, 138, 203
Obscenity, 142
Omission, 82, 107, 232
Outdoing wit, 96, 97
P
Parody, 280, 324
Pascal, 337
Paul, 3, 7, 8, 18, 29, 301
Persons in tendency-wit, 144, 221, 222, 230, 231, 240
Perversion, 141
Phillips, 151
Play, 211 and jest, 195 on words, 40
Playing with words, 196
Pleasure in nonsense, 190, 271 mechanisms of wit, 177 sources, 150
Psychic energy, 227
Psychoneuroses, 147
Puns, 53
R
Recognition, 183
Regression, 259
Representation through the opposite, 93, 95 through the minute, 111, 112
Repression, 147, 205, 211
Riddle, 232
Rousseau, J. B., 91
Rousseau, J. J., 33
S
Sancho Panza, 216
Satire, 43, 137
Schnitzler, 42
Sense in nonsense, 73, 74, 75, 199
Sexual elements, 139, 140, 219
Shakespeare, 222
Shake-up rhymes, 129
Sky-larking, 192
Smutty jokes, 139, 145, 233
Society, 150
Sophism, 82, 83, 159
Sophistic displacement, 161 faulty thinking, 78, 79
Soulié, 57
Sound, similarity, 39
Spencer, 225
Spinoza, 106
Stettenheim, 343
Subjective determinations, 155, 156, 166, 215, 217
Substitutive formation, 20
T
Tendencies of wit, 127, 206
Tendency to economy, 49
Tendency-wit, 130 its effect, 210
Thought-wit, 128 its techniques, 154
Travesty, 280, 324
U
Ueberhorst, 91
Unconscious, 254, 255, 269, 279, 281, 329 and the infantile, 268
Unification, 45, 88, 117, 121, 188
Unmasking, 303, 324
V
Vischer, 3, 8, 128
Voltaire, 91
W
Winslow, 45
Wish fulfilment, 249, 253
Wit, 4 and comic, 4, 330 and dreams, 249, 273, 285 and rebellion against authority, 153 as an inspiration, 265 as a social process, 214 by word-division, 32 definitions of, 6, 7, 8 desire to impart it, 239 double-facedness of, 240 harmless, 128 hostile and obscene, 138 in the service of tendencies, 146 ironical, 100 its motives, 214 its subjective determinations, 155 its tendencies, 127
Wit, literature of, 134 outdoing, 96, 97 pleasure mechanisms of, 177, 230 psychogenesis of, 177, 195, 200 shallow, 131 skeptical, 172, 173 technique of, 14, 194, 240
Wit-work, its formula, 261
Witticism and riddle, 232 critical, 171
Witticisms, blasphemous, 171
Witty nonsense, 211, 212
Woman, unyieldingness of, 143
Word-division, 32, 33, 34
Word-pleasure, 190
Word-wit, 128, 131
Footnote 1:
Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Pub. Co., 2nd Ed., 1912.
Footnote 2:
Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Pub. Co., 2nd Ed., 1916.
Footnote 3:
The Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen & Unwin, London.
Footnote 4:
The Macmillan Co., New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London.
Footnote 5:
This expression is used advisedly in order to distinguish it from other methods of “analysis,” which Professor Freud fully disavows. Cf. _The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement_, translated by A. A. Brill, _The Psychoanalytic Review_, June-Sept., 1916.
Footnote 6:
Cf. the works of Freud, Abraham, Rank, and others.
Footnote 7:
Cf. Freud: _Totem and Taboo_, a translation in preparation, and the works of Jones, Rank and Sachs, Jung, and Storfer.
Footnote 8:
Cf. Freud, Berny, Rank, and Sachs, and Sperber.
Footnote 9:
Cf. Freud: _Leonardo da Vinci_, a translation in preparation, and the works of many others.
Footnote 10:
Cf. _v._ Hug-Hellmuth: _Aus dem Seelenleben des Kindes_, and the works of Jones, Pfister, and many others.
Footnote 11:
Cf. the works of Freud, Putnam, Hitschmann, Winterstein, and others.
Footnote 12:
_Beiträge zur Aesthetik_, edited by Theodor Lipps and Richard Maria Werner, VI,—a book to which I am indebted for the courage and capacity to undertake this attempt.
Footnote 13:
J. V. Falke: _Lebenserinnerungen_, 1897.
Footnote 14:
Since this joke will occupy us again and we do not wish to disturb the discussion following here, we shall find occasion later to point out a correction in Lipps’s given interpretation which follows our own.
Footnote 15:
The same holds true for Lipps’s interpretation.
Footnote 16:
_Psychanalysis_: Its Theories and Application, 2nd Ed., p. 331.
Footnote 17:
This same witticism was supposed to have been coined before by Heine concerning Alfred de Musset.
Footnote 18:
One of the complications involved in the technique of this example lies in the fact that the modification through which the omitted abuse is substituted is to be taken as an allusion to the latter, for it leads to it only through a process of deduction.
Footnote 19:
Another factor which I shall mention later on is also effective in the technique of this witticism. It has to do with the inner character of the modification (representation through the opposite—contradiction). The technique of wit does not hesitate to make use simultaneously of several means, with which, however, we can only become acquainted in their sequential order.
Footnote 20:
Translation of 4th Ed. by A. A. Brill, the Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen & Unwin, London.
Footnote 21:
_The Interpretation of Dreams_, p. 280.
Footnote 22:
Cited by Brill: _Psychanalysis_, p. 335.
Footnote 23:
l. c., p. 334.
Footnote 24:
The excellence of these jokes depends upon the fact that they, at the same time, present another technical means of a much higher order.
Footnote 25:
Given by Translator.
Footnote 26:
This resembles an excellent joke of Oliver Wendell Holmes cited by Brill: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” A contradiction is here announced which does not appear. At all events it is a good example of the untranslatableness of the witticisms of such technique.
Footnote 27:
Brill cites a very analogous modification wit: _Amantes—Amentes_ (lovers—lunatics).
Footnote 28:
Compare here K. Fischer (p. 85), who applies the term “double meaning” to those witticisms in which both meanings are not equally prominent, but where one overshadows the other. I have applied this term differently. Such a nomenclature is a matter of choice. Usage of speech has rendered no definite decision about them.
Footnote 29:
L. c., page 339.
Footnote 30:
Heine’s answer is a combination of two wit-techniques—a displacement and an allusion—for he does not say directly: “He is an ox.”
Footnote 31:
The word “take,” owing to its meanings, lends itself very well towards the formation of plays upon words, a pure example of which I wish to cite as a contrast to the displacement mentioned above. While walking with his friend, in front of a café, a well-known stock-plunger and bank director made this proposal: “Let us go in and take something.” His friend held him back and said: “My dear sir, remember there are people in there.”
Footnote 32:
For the latter see a later chapter. It will perhaps not be superfluous to add here a few words for better understanding. The displacement regularly occurs between a statement and an answer, and turns the stream of thought to a direction different from the one started in the statement. The justification for separating the displacement from the double meaning is best seen in the examples where both are combined, that is, where the wording of the statement admits of a double meaning which was not intended by the speaker, but which reveals in the answer the way to the displacement (see examples).
Footnote 33:
See Chapter III.
Footnote 34:
A similar nonsense technique results when the joke aims to maintain a connection which seems to be removed through the special conditions of its content. A joke of this sort is related by J. Falke (l. c.): “_Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke these words?_” “_Yes, this is the place; but he never spoke these words._”
Footnote 35:
Following an example of the _Greek Anthology_.
Footnote 36:
Cf. my _Interpretation of Dreams_, Chap. VI, _The Dream Work_, translated by A. A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen & Unwin, London.
Footnote 37:
The word tendency encountered hereafter in the expression “Tendency-Wit” (Tendenz Witz) is used adjectively in the same sense as in the familiar phrase “Tendency Play.”
Footnote 38:
Cf. my _Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, translated by A. A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London.
Footnote 39:
Cf. _Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex_, 2nd Ed., 1916, translated by A. A. Brill, Monograph Series, _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_.
Footnote 40:
Moll’s _Kontrektationstrieb_ (Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualies, 1898).
Footnote 41:
It is the same mechanism that controls “slips of the tongue” and other phenomena of self-betrayal. Cf. _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_.
Footnote 42:
“There is nothing certain about to-morrow,” Lorenzo del Medici.
Footnote 43:
See his essays in the _Politisch-anthropologischen Revue_, II, 1903.
Footnote 44:
An habitual beggar.
Footnote 45: