My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 10 страница

Lichtenberg’s jokes are outstanding above all on account of their intellectual content and the certainty with which they hit their mark. Goethe was quite right in saying of that author that in fact his joking and jesting ideas concealed problems; it would have been even more correct to say that they touch on the solution of problems. When, for instance, he remarked as a joke: ‘He had read Homer so much that he always read "Agamemnon" instead of "angenommen "‘ - the technique used is ‘stupidity’ plus ‘similarity of sound’ - Lichtenberg had discovered nothing less than the secret of misreading.¹

Similarly with a joke the technique of which struck us as most unsatisfactory (p. 1661): ‘He wondered how it is that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are’. The stupidity that is paraded here is only apparent. In fact, behind this simple remark lies the great problem of teleology in the structure of animals. It was by no means so completely a matter of course that the palpebral fissure should open at the point at which the cornea is exposed, until the theory of evolution had thrown light on the coincidence.

We shall bear in mind the fact that we receive from joking remarks a total impression in which we are unable to separate the share taken by the thought content from the share taken by the joke-work. It may be that later on we shall find a still more significant parallel to this.

¹ See my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b)1 From the point of view of throwing theoretical light on the nature of jokes, innocent jokes are bound to be of more value to us than tendentious ones, and trivial jokes of more value than profound ones. Innocent and trivial jokes are likely to put the problem of jokes before us in its purest form, since with them we avoid the danger of being confused by their purpose or having our judgement misled by their good sense. On the basis of such material our discoveries can make fresh advances.

I will select the most innocent possible example of a verbal joke:

‘A girl to whom a visitor was announced while she was at her toilet complained: "Oh, what a shame that one mayn’t let oneself be seen just when one’s at one’s most anziehend"'¹ (Kleinpaul, 1890.)

Since, however, doubts arise in me after all as to whether I have a right to describe this joke as being non-tendentious, I will replace it by another one which is extremely simple and should really not be open to that objection.

At the end of a meal in a house to which I had been invited as a guest, a pudding of the kind known as a ‘roulard’ was served. It requires some skill on the part of the cook to make it; so one of the guests asked: ‘Made in the house?’ To which the host replied: ‘Yes, indeed. A home-roulard.’

¹ [‘Anziehend’ means both ‘dressing’ and ‘attractive’.]2

This time we will not examine the technique of the joke; we propose to turn our attention to another factor, which is actually the most important one. When those of us present heard this improvised joke it gave us pleasure - which I can clearly recall - and made us laugh. In this instance, as in countless others, the hearers’ feeling of pleasure cannot have arisen from the purpose of the joke or from its intellectual content; there is nothing left open to us but to bring that feeling of pleasure into connection with the technique of the joke. The technical methods of joking which we have earlier described - condensation, displacement, indirect representation and so on - thus possess the power of evoking a feeling of pleasure in the hearer, though we cannot in the least see how they may have acquired this power. In this simple way we arrive at the second thesis in our clarification of jokes; the first (p. 1623) asserted that the characteristic of jokes lay in their form of expression. Let us further reflect that this second thesis has in fact taught us nothing new. It merely isolates what was already included in an observation we had made earlier. It will be recalled that when we had succeeded in reducing a joke (that is, in replacing its form of expression by another one, while carefully preserving its sense) it had lost not only its character as a joke but also its power to make us laugh - our enjoyment of the joke.

We cannot proceed further at this point without a discussion with our philosophical authorities.

The philosophers, who count jokes a part of the comic and who treat of the comic itself under the heading of aesthetics, define an aesthetic idea by the condition that in it we are not trying to get anything from things or do anything with them, that we are not needing things in order to satisfy one of our major vital needs, but that we are content with contemplating them and with the enjoyment of the idea. ‘This enjoyment, this kind of ideation, is the purely aesthetic one, which lies only in itself, which has its aim only in itself and which fulfils none of the other aims of life.’ (Fischer, 1889, 20.)

We shall scarcely be contradicting this statement of Fischer’s - we shall perhaps be doing no more than translating his thoughts into our mode of expression - if we insist that the joking activity should not, after all, be described as pointless or aimless, since it has the unmistakable aim of evoking pleasure in its hearers. I doubt if we are in a position to undertake anything without having an intention in view. If we do not require our mental apparatus at the moment for supplying one of our indispensable satisfactions, we allow it itself to work in the direction of pleasure and we seek to derive pleasure from its own activity. I suspect that this is in general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation, but I understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this statement. As regards joking, however, I can assert, on the basis of the two discoveries we have already made, that it is an activity which aims at deriving pleasure from mental processes, whether intellectual or otherwise. No doubt there are other activities which have the same aim. They are perhaps differentiated according to the fields of mental activity from which they seek to derive pleasure or perhaps according to the methods of which they make use. We cannot for the moment decide about this; but we hold firmly to the view that the joke technique and the tendency towards economy by which it is partly governed (p. 1647 ff.) have been brought into connection with the production of pleasure.

But before we set about solving the riddle of how the technical methods of the joke-work are able to excite pleasure in the hearer, we have to recall the fact that, with a view to simplification and greater perspicuity, we have left tendentious jokes entirely on one side. We must, after all, try to throw light on the question of what the purposes of jokes are, and how they serve those purposes.

There is, first and foremost, one observation which warns us not to leave tendentious jokes on one side in our investigation of the origin of the pleasure we take in jokes. The pleasurable effect of innocent jokes is as a rule a moderate one; a clear sense of satisfaction, a slight smile, is as a rule all it can achieve in its hearers. And it may be that a part even of this effect is to be attributed to the joke’s intellectual content, as we have seen from suitable examples (p. 1690). A non-tendentious joke scarcely ever achieves the sudden burst of laughter which makes tendentious ones so irresistible. Since the technique of both can be the same, a suspicion may be aroused in us that tendentious jokes, by virtue of their purpose, must have sources of pleasure at their disposal to which innocent jokes have no access.

The purposes of jokes can easily be reviewed. Where a joke is not an aim in itself - that is, where it is not an innocent one - there are only two purposes that it may serve, and these two can themselves be subsumed under a single heading. It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure). It must be repeated in advance that the technical species of the joke - whether it is a verbal or a conceptual joke - bears no relation to these two purposes.

It is a much lengthier business to show the way in which jokes serve these two purposes. In this investigation I should prefer to deal first not with the hostile jokes but with the exposing jokes. It is true that these have been far more rarely deemed worthy of investigation, as though aversion to the thing itself had here been transferred to the discussion of it. But we will not allow ourselves to be disconcerted by this, for we shall immediately come upon a marginal case of joking which promises to bring us enlightenment on more than one obscurity,

We know what is meant by ‘smut’: the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual facts and relations by speech. This definition, however, is no more valid than other definitions. In spite of this definition, a lecture on the anatomy of the sexual organs or the physiology of procreation need not have a single point of contact with smut. It is a further relevant fact that smut is directed to a particular person, by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hearing it, is expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a result to become sexually excited in turn. Instead of this excitement the other person may be led to feel shame or embarrassment, which is only a reaction against the excitement and, in a roundabout way, is an admission of it. Smut is thus originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction. If a man in a company of men enjoys telling or listening to smut, the original situation, which owing to social inhibitions cannot be realized, is at the same time imagined. A person who laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression.

The sexual material which forms the content of smut includes more than what is peculiar to each sex; it also includes what is common to both sexes and to which the feeling of shame extends - that is to say, what is excremental in the most comprehensive sense. This is, however, the sense covered by sexuality in childhood, an age at which there is, as it were, a cloaca within which what is sexual and what is excremental are barely or not at all distinguished.¹ Throughout the whole range of the psychology of the neuroses, what is sexual includes what is excremental, and is understood in the old, infantile, sense.

¹ See my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), which is appearing at the same time as the present work.5

Smut is like an exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it. It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut.

It can only help to clarify things if at this point we go back to fundamental facts. A desire to see the organs peculiar to each sex exposed is one of the original components of our libido. It may itself be a substitute for something earlier and go back to a hypothetical primary desire to touch the sexual parts. As so often, looking has replaced touching.¹ The libido for looking and touching is present in everyone in two forms, active and passive, male and female; and, according to the preponderance of the sexual character, one form or the other predominates. It is easy to observe the inclination to self-exposure in young children. In cases in which the germ of this inclination escapes its usual fate of being buried and suppressed, it develops in men into the familiar perversion known as exhibitionism. In women the inclination to passive exhibitionism is almost invariably buried under the imposing reactive function of sexual modesty, but not without a loophole being left for it in relation to clothes. I need only hint at the elasticity and variability in the amount of exhibitionism that women are permitted to retain in accordance with differing convention and circumstances.

In men a high degree of this trend persists as a portion of their libido, and it serves to introduce the sexual act. When this urge makes itself felt at the first approach to a woman, it must make use of words, for two reasons; firstly, to announce itself to her, and secondly, because if the idea is aroused by speech it may induce a corresponding excitement in the woman herself and may awaken an inclination in her to passive exhibitionism. A wooing speech like this is not yet smut, but it passes over into it. If the woman’s readiness emerges quickly the obscene speech has a short life; it yields at once to a sexual action. It is otherwise if quick readiness on the woman’s part is not to be counted on, and if in place of it defensive reactions appear. In that case the sexually exciting speech becomes an aim in itself in the shape of smut. Since the sexual aggressiveness is held up in its advance towards the act, it pauses at the evocation of the excitement and derives pleasure from the signs of it in the woman. In so doing, the aggressiveness is no doubt altering its character as well, just as any libidinal impulse will if it is met by an obstacle. It becomes positively hostile and cruel, and it thus summons to its help against the obstacle the sadistic components of the sexual instinct.

The woman’s inflexibility is therefore the first condition for the development of smut, although, to be sure, it seems merely to imply a postponement and does not indicate that further efforts will be in vain. The ideal case of a resistance of this kind on the woman’s part occurs if another man is present at the same time - a third person -, for in that case an immediate surrender by the woman is as good as out of the question. This third person soon acquires the greatest importance in the development of the smut; to begin with, however, the presence of the woman is not to be overlooked. Among country people or in inns of the humbler sort it will be noticed that it is not until the entrance of the barmaid or the innkeeper’s wife that smuttiness starts up. Only at higher social levels is the opposite found, and the presence of a woman brings the smut to an end. The men save up this kind of entertainment, which originally presupposed the presence of a woman who was feeling ashamed, till they are ‘alone together’. So that gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near to assuming the character of a joke.

From this point onwards our attention will be drawn to two factors: the part played by the third person, the listener, and the conditions governing the subject-matter of the smut itself.

¹ Cf. Moll’s instinct of ‘contrectation’ (Moll, 1898).6

Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. We shall have later to examine the deeper reasons for this state of things; for the moment let us keep to the fact to which this testifies - namely that it is not the person who makes the joke who laughs at it and who therefore enjoys its pleasurable effect, but the inactive listener. In the case of smut the three people are in the same relation. The course of events may be thus described. When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido.

It is remarkable how universally popular a smutty interchange of this kind is among the common people and how it unfailingly produces a cheerful mood. But it also deserves to be noticed that in this complicated procedure, which involves so many of the characteristics of tendentious jokes, none of the formal requirements which characterize jokes are made of the smut itself. The uttering of an undisguised indecency gives the first person enjoyment and makes the third person laugh.

Only when we rise to a society of a more refined education do the formal conditions for jokes play a part. The smut becomes a joke and is only tolerated when it has the character of a joke. The technical method which it usually employs is the allusion - that is, replacement by something small, something remotely connected, which the hearer reconstructs in his imagination into a complete and straightforward obscenity. The greater the discrepancy between what is given directly in the form of smut and what it necessarily calls up in the hearer, the more refined becomes the joke and the higher, too, it may venture to climb into good society. As can easily be shown from examples, smut which has the characteristics of a joke has at its disposal, apart from allusion, whether coarse or refined, all the other methods of verbal and conceptual jokes.

And here at last we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way. They circumvent this obstacle and in that way draw pleasure from a source which the obstacle had made inaccessible. The obstacle standing in the way is in reality nothing other than women’s incapacity to tolerate undisguised sexuality, an incapacity correspondingly increased with a rise in the educational and social level. The woman who is thought of as having been present in the initial situation is afterwards retained as though she were still present, or in her absence her influence still has an intimidating effect on the men. We can observe how men of a higher class are at once induced, when they are in the company of girls of an inferior class, to reduce their smutty jokes to the level of simple smut.

The power which makes it difficult or impossible for women, and to a lesser degree for men as well, to enjoy undisguised obscenity is termed by us ‘repression’; and we recognize in it the same psychical process which, in cases of serious illness, keeps whole complexes of impulses, together with their derivatives, away from consciousness, and which has turned out to be the main factor in the causation of what are known as psycho-neuroses. It is our belief that civilization and higher education have a large influence in the development of repression, and we suppose that, under such conditions, the psychical organization undergoes an alteration (that can also emerge as an inherited disposition) as a result of which what was formerly felt as agreeable now seems unacceptable and is rejected with all possible psychical force. The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost. When we laugh at a refined obscene joke, we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut. In both cases the pleasure springs from the same source. We, however, could never bring ourselves to laugh at the coarse smut; we should feel ashamed or it would seem to us disgusting. We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.

Thus what we suspected to begin with seems to be confirmed: namely that tendentious jokes have sources of pleasure at their disposal besides those open to innocent jokes, in which all the pleasure is in some way linked to their technique. And we may also once more repeat that with tendentious jokes we are not in a position to distinguish by our feeling what part of the pleasure arises from the sources of their technique and what part from those of their purpose. Thus, strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at. With all obscene jokes we are subject to glaring errors of judgement about the ‘goodness’ of jokes so far as this depends on formal determinants; the technique of such jokes is often quite wretched, but they have immense success in provoking laughter. We will now examine the question of whether jokes play the same part in the service of a hostile purpose.

Here, from the outset, we come upon the same situation. Since our individual childhood, and, similarly, since the childhood of human civilization, hostile impulses against our fellow men have been subject to the same restrictions, the same progressive repression, as our sexual urges. We have not yet got so far as to be able to love our enemies or to offer our left cheek after being struck on the right. Furthermore, all moral rules for the restriction of active hatred give the clearest evidence to this day that they were originally framed for a small society of fellow clansmen. In so far as we are all able to feel that we are members of one people, we allow ourselves to disregard most of these restrictions in relation to a foreign people. Nevertheless, within our own circle we have made some advances in the control of hostile impulses. As Lichtenberg puts it in drastic terms: ‘Where we now say "Excuse me!" we used to give a box on the ears.’ Brutal hostility, forbidden by law, has been replaced by verbal invective; and a better knowledge of the interlinking of human impulses is more and more robbing us - by its consistent ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ - of the capacity for feeling angry with a fellow man who gets in our way. Though as children we are still endowed with a powerful inherited disposition to hostility, we are later taught by a higher personal civilization that it is an unworthy thing to use abusive language; and even where fighting has in itself remained permissible, the number of things which may not be employed as methods of fighting has extraordinarily increased. Since we have been obliged to renounce the expression of hostility by deeds - held back by the passionless third person, in whose interest it is that personal security shall be preserved - we have, just as in the case of sexual aggressiveness, developed a new technique of invective, which aims at enlisting this third person against our enemy. By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him - to which the third person, who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter.

We are now prepared to realize the part played by jokes in hostile aggressiveness. A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously; once again, then, the joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation, just as on other occasions we ourselves have often been bribed by an innocent joke into over estimating the substance of a statement expressed jokingly. This is brought out with perfect aptitude in the common phrase ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen [to bring the laughers over to our side]’.

Let us, for instance, consider Herr N.’s jokes, which were scattered over the last chapter. They are all of them pieces of invective. It is as though Herr N. wanted to exclaim aloud: ‘The Minister for Agriculture is himself an ox!’ ‘Don’t talk to me about * * * *! He’s bursting with vanity!’ ‘I’ve never in my life read anything more boring than this historian’s essays on Napoleon in Austria!’ But the high position he occupies makes it impossible for him to give out his judgements in that form. They therefore bring in a joke to their help, and this in turn guarantees them a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form, in spite of the truth they might contain. One of these jokes is particularly instructive - the one about the ‘red Fadian’, perhaps the most impressive of all of them. What is there about it that makes us laugh and diverts our interest so completely from the question of whether or not an injustice has been done to the poor author? The joking form, of course - that is to say, the joke; but what is there about it that we are laughing at? No doubt at the person himself, who is introduced to us as the ‘red Fadian’, and in particular at his having red hair. Educated people have broken themselves of the habit of laughing at physical defects, and moreover they do not include having red hair among the laughable physical failings. But there is no doubt that it is so regarded by schoolboys and the common people - and this is still true even at the level of education of certain municipal and parliamentary representatives. And now Herr N. has made it possible in the most ingenious manner for us, grown-up and sensitive people, to laugh like the schoolboys at the historian X’s red hair. This was certainly not Herr N.’s intention; but it is most doubtful whether a person who gives free play to a joke must necessarily know its precise intention.

If in these cases the obstacle to the aggressiveness which the joke helped to evade was an internal one - an aesthetic objection to the invective - elsewhere it can be of a purely external sort. This was so in the case in which Serenissimus asked a stranger by whose similarity to his own person he had been struck: ‘Was your mother in the Palace at one time?’ and the repartee was: ‘No, but my father was.’ The person to whom the question was put would no doubt have liked to knock down the impertinent individual who dared by such an allusion to cast a slur on his beloved mother’s memory. But the impertinent individual was Serenissimus, whom one may not knock down or even insult unless one is prepared to purchase that revenge at the price of one’s whole existence. The insult must therefore, it would seem, be swallowed in silence. But fortunately a joke shows the way in which the insult may be safely avenged - by making use of the technical method of unification in order to take up the allusion and turn it back against the aggressor. Here the impression of a joke is so much determined by its purpose that, in face of the joking character of the rejoinder, we are inclined to forget that the question asked by the aggressor had itself the character of a joke with the technique of allusion.

The prevention of invective or of insulting rejoinders by external circumstances is such a common case that tendentious jokes are especially favoured in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure. The charm of caricatures lies in this same factor: we laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count rebellion against authority as a merit.

If we bear in mind the fact that tendentious jokes are so highly suitable for attacks on the great, the dignified and the mighty, who are protected by internal inhibitions and external circumstances from direct disparagement, we shall be obliged to take a special view of certain groups of jokes which seem to be concerned with inferior and powerless people. I am thinking of the anecdotes about marriage-brokers, some of which we became acquainted with in the course of our investigation of the various techniques of conceptual jokes. In a few of them, for instance in the examples ‘She’s deaf as well’ and ‘Who would lend these people anything?’, the broker is laughed at for his improvidence and thoughtlessness and he becomes comic because the truth escapes him as it were automatically. But does what we have learnt of the nature of tendentious jokes on the one hand and on the other hand our great enjoyment of these stories fit in with the paltriness of the people whom these jokes seem to laugh at? Are they worthy opponents of the jokes? Is it not rather the case that the jokes only put forward the marriage-brokers in order to strike at something more important? Is it not a case of saying one thing and meaning another? It is really not possible to reject this view.

This interpretation of the broker anecdotes may be carried further. It is true that there is no necessity for my entering into them, that I can content myself with regarding these anecdotes as ‘Schwänke [funny stories]’ and deny that they have the character of a joke. Thus jokes can also have a subjective determinant of this kind. Our attention has now been drawn to that possibility and we shall have to examine it later. It declares that only what I allow to be a joke is a joke. What is a joke to me may be merely a comic story to other people. But if a joke admits of this doubt, the reason can only be that it has a façade - in these instances a comic one - in the contemplation of which one person is satiated while another may try to peer behind it. A suspicion may arise, moreover, that this façade is intended to dazzle the examining eye and that these stories have therefore something to conceal.

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