My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 16 страница

In view of the universal predominance in jokes of this peculiar technique for overcoming their inhibitions, it might be thought superfluous for them ever to make use in particular cases of the technique of displacement. But, on the one hand, certain species of that technique remain of value to jokes as aims and as sources of pleasure - for instance, displacement proper (diversion of thoughts), which indeed partakes of the nature of nonsense. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that the highest stage of jokes, tendentious jokes, often have to overcome two kinds of inhibition, those opposed to the joke itself and those opposed to its purpose (p. 1696), and that allusions and displacements are well qualified to make this latter task possible.

The abundant and unrestrained use in the dream-work of indirect representation, of displacements, and especially of allusions, has a result which I mention not for its own importance but because it became my subjective reason for taking up the problem of jokes. If one gives an account to an uninformed or unaccustomed person of a dream-analysis, in which are set out, therefore, the strange processes of allusions and displacements - processes so obnoxious to waking life - of which the dream-work has made use, the reader receives an uncomfortable impression and declares that these interpretations are ‘in the nature of a joke’. But he clearly does not regard them as successful jokes, but as forced, and in some way violating the rules of jokes. It is easy to explain this impression. It arises from the fact that the dream-work operates by the same methods as jokes, but in its use of them it transgresses the limits that are respected by jokes. We shall presently learn that, as a result of the part played by the third person, jokes are bound by a certain condition which does not apply to dreams.

Among the techniques common to jokes and dreams, representation by the opposite and the use of nonsense claim some amount of our interest. The former is one of the more effective methods employed in jokes, as may be seen among others by the examples of ‘overstatement jokes’ (p. 1670 f.). Incidentally, representation by the opposite is not able, like most other joke-techniques, to escape conscious attention. A person who tries to bring the joke-work into operation in himself as deliberately as possible - a professional wag - soon discovers as a rule that the easiest way of replying to an assertion by a joke is by asserting its contrary and by leaving it to the inspiration of the moment to get rid of the objection which his contradiction is likely to provoke, by giving what he has said a fresh interpretation. It may be that representation by the opposite owes the favour it enjoys to the fact that it forms the core of another pleasurable way of expressing a thought, which can be understood without any need for bringing in the unconscious. I am thinking of irony, which comes very close to joking and is counted among the sub-species of the comic. Its essence lies in saying the opposite of what one intends to convey to the other person, but in sparing him contradiction by making him understand - by one’s tone of voice, by some accompanying gesture, or (where writing is concerned) by some small stylistic indications - that one means the opposite of what one says. Irony can only be employed when the other person is prepared to hear the opposite, so that he cannot fail to feel an inclination to contradict. As a result of this condition, irony is exposed particularly easily to the danger of being misunderstood. It brings the person who uses it the advantage of enabling him readily to evade the difficulties of direct expression, for instance in invectives. It produces comic pleasure in the hearer, probably because it stirs him into a contradictory expenditure of energy which is at once recognized as being unnecessary. A comparison like this between jokes and a closely related type of the comic may confirm our assumption that what is peculiar to jokes is their relation to the unconscious and that this may perhaps distinguish them from the comic as well.¹

In the dream-work, representation by the opposite plays a far greater part even than in jokes. Dreams are not merely fond of representing two contraries by one and the same composite structure, but they so often change something in the dream-thoughts into its opposite that this leads to a great difficulty in the work of interpretation. ‘There is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’²

¹ The characteristic of the comic which is described as its ‘dryness’ depends likewise on the distinction between a statement and the gestures (in the widest sense of the word) accompanying it.

² The Interpretation of Dreams.8

I must state emphatically that this fact has not up to now met with any recognition. But it seems to point to an important characteristic of unconscious thinking, in which in all probability no process that resembles ‘judging’ occurs. In the place of rejection by a judgement, what we find in the unconscious is ‘repression’. Repression may, without doubt, be correctly described as the intermediate stage between a defensive reflex and a condemning judgement.¹

Nonsense, absurdity, which appears so often in dreams and has brought them into so much undeserved contempt, never arises by chance through the ideational elements being jumbled together, but can always be shown to have been admitted by the dream-work intentionally and to be designed to represent embittered criticism and contemptuous contradiction in the dream-thoughts. Thus the absurdity in the content of the dream takes the place of the judgement ‘this is a piece of nonsense’ in the dream-thoughts. I laid great stress on the evidence of this in my Interpretation of Dreams because I thought that in this way I could make the most forcible attack on the error of believing that the dream is not a psychical phenomenon at all - an error which blocks the way to a knowledge of the unconscious. We have now learned, in the course of solving certain tendentious jokes (p. 1660 ff.), that nonsense in jokes is made to serve the same aims of representation. We know too that a senseless façade to a joke is particularly well suited to increase the hearer’s psychical expenditure and so to raise the quota liberated for discharge by laughing. But besides this, it must not be forgotten that the nonsense in a joke is an end in itself, since the intention of recovering the old pleasure in nonsense is among the joke-work’s motives. There are other ways of recovering the nonsense and of deriving pleasure from it: caricature, exaggeration, parody and travesty make use of them and so create ‘comic nonsense’. If we submit these forms of expression to an analysis similar to the one we have applied to jokes, we shall find that in none of these cases is there any occasion for bringing in unconscious processes in our sense in order to explain them. We can now understand too how it is that the characteristic of being a joke can come as an extra addition to a caricature, exaggeration or parody; what makes this possible is a difference in the ‘psychical scene of action’.²

¹ The highly remarkable and still insufficiently appreciated behaviour of the relation between contraries in the unconscious is no doubt likely to help our understanding of ‘negativism’ in neurotic and insane patients. (Cf. the two last works on the subject: Bleuler, 1904 and Gross, 1904. [Added 1912:] See also my review of ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1910e).)

² An expression used by Fechner which has acquired importance as a support for my views.

The assignment of the joke-work to the system of the unconscious has, I think, become of considerably greater importance to us now that it has enabled us to understand the fact that the techniques to which jokes admittedly cling are, on the other hand, not their exclusive property. Some doubts which we were obliged to hold over until later in our original examination of these techniques now find a comfortable solution. For that very reason another doubt that arises is all the more deserving of our consideration. This suggests that the undeniable relation of jokes to the unconscious is in fact only valid for certain categories of tendentious jokes, whereas we are prepared to extend it to every species and every developmental stage of jokes. We must not evade an examination of this objection.

It can be assumed with certainty that jokes are formed in the unconscious when it is a question of jokes in the service of unconscious purposes or of purposes reinforced by the unconscious - that is, of most ‘cynical’ jokes. For in such cases the unconscious purpose drags the preconscious thought down into the unconscious and there gives it a new shape - a process to which the study of the psychology of the neuroses has taught us numerous analogies. In the case, however, of tendentious jokes of other kinds, of innocent jokes and of jests, this downward dragging force seems absent and the relation of jokes to the unconscious is accordingly called in question.

But let us now consider the case in which a thought, not worthless in itself, arises in the course of a train of thought and is expressed as a joke. In order to enable this thought to be turned into(a joke, it is clearly necessary to select from among the possible forms of expression the precise one which brings along with it a yield of verbal pleasure. We know from self-observation that this selection is not made by conscious attention; but it will certainly help the selection if the cathexis of the preconscious thought is reduced to an unconscious one, for, as we have learnt from the dream-work, the connecting paths which start out from words are in the unconscious treated in the same way as connections between things. An unconscious cathexis offers far more favourable conditions for selecting the expression. Moreover, we can immediately assume that the possible form of expression that involves a yield of verbal pleasure exercises the same downward drag on the still unsettled wording of the preconscious thought as did the unconscious purpose in the earlier case. To meet the simpler case of the jest, we may suppose that an intention which is all the time on the look-out to achieve a yield of verbal pleasure grasps the occasion offered in the preconscious for dragging the cathectic process down into the unconscious according to the familiar pattern.

I should be very glad if it were possible for me on the one hand to give a clearer exposition of this single decisive point in my view of jokes and on the other hand to reinforce it with conclusive arguments. But in fact what I am faced with here is not a two-fold failure but one and the same failure. I cannot give a clearer exposition because I have no further proof of my view. I arrived at it on the basis of a study of the technique and of a comparison with the dream-work, and on no other basis; and I then found that on the whole it fits in excellently with the characteristics of jokes. Thus this view has been arrived at by inference; and if from an inference of this kind one is led, not to a familiar region, but on the contrary, to one that is alien and new to one’s thought, one calls the inference a ‘hypothesis’ and rightly refuses to regard the relation of the hypothesis to the material from which it was inferred as a ‘proof’ of it. It can only be regarded as ‘proved’ if it is reached by another path as well and if it can be shown to be the nodal point of still other connections. But proof of this sort is not to be had, in view of the fact that our knowledge of unconscious processes has scarcely begun. In the realization that we are standing upon ground which has never before been trodden, we are thus content, from our point of observation, to take one single, short and uncertain step forward into the unexplored region.

On such a foundation we cannot build a great deal. If we bring the various stages of the joke into relation to the mental states that are favourable to them we can perhaps proceed as follows. The jest springs from a cheerful mood, which seems to be characterized by an inclination to diminish mental cathexes. It already employs all the characteristic techniques of jokes and already fulfils their fundamental condition by selecting verbal material or connections of thoughts which will meet both the demands for a yield of pleasure and those made by rational criticism. We shall conclude that the lowering of the thought cathexis to the unconscious level, facilitated by the cheerful mood, is present already in jests. In the case of innocent jokes that are linked to the expression of a valuable thought, the encouraging effect of mood no longer applies. Here we must presume the occurrence of a special personal aptitude, which is manifested in the ease with which the preconscious cathexis is dropped and exchanged for a moment for the unconscious one. A purpose that is all the time on the watch for renewing the original yield of pleasure from jokes exercises a downward drag on the still unsettled preconscious expression of the thought. No doubt most people are capable of producing jests when they are in a cheerful mood; the aptitude for making jokes is present in only a few people independently of their mood. Lastly, the joke-work receives its most powerful stimulus when strong purposes reaching down into the unconscious are present, which represent a special aptitude for the production of jokes and which may explain to us how it is that the subjective determinants of jokes are so often fulfilled in neurotic people. Under the influence of strong purposes even those who otherwise have the least aptitude for it become capable of making jokes.

With this last contribution, however, which explains, even though still only hypothetically, the joke-work in the first person, our interest in jokes is, strictly speaking, at an end. It remains for us to make a further short comparison between jokes and the better-known dream; and we may expect that, apart from the single conformity we have already considered, two such dissimilar mental functions will only reveal differences. The most important difference lies in their social behaviour. A dream is a completely asocial mental product; it has nothing to communicate to anyone else; it arises within the subject as a compromise between the mental forces struggling in him, it remains unintelligible to the subject himself and is for that reason totally uninteresting to other people. Not only does it not need to set any store by intelligibility, it must actually avoid being understood, for otherwise it would be destroyed; it can only exist in masquerade. For that reason it can without hindrance make use of the mechanism that dominates unconscious mental processes, to the point of a distortion which can no longer be set straight. A joke, on the other hand, is the most social of all the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure. It often calls for three persons and its completion requires the participation of someone else in the mental process it starts. The condition of intelligibility is, therefore, binding on it; it may only make use of possible distortion in the unconscious through condensation and displacement up to the point at which it can be set straight by the third person’s understanding. Moreover, jokes and dreams have grown up in quite different regions of mental life and must be allotted to points in the psychological system far remote from each other. A dream still remains a wish, even though one that has been made unrecognizable; a joke is developed play. Dreams, in spite of all their practical nonentity, retain their connection with the major interests of life; they seek to fulfil needs by the regressive detour of hallucination, and they are permitted to occur for the sake of the one need that is active during the night - the need to sleep. Jokes, on the other hand, seek to gain a small yield of pleasure from the mere activity, untrammelled by needs, of our mental apparatus. Later they try to catch hold of that pleasure as a by-product during the activity of that apparatus and thus arrive secondarily at not unimportant functions directed to the external world. Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of unpleasure, jokes for the attainment of pleasure; but all our mental activities converge in these two aims.

VII JOKES AND THE SPECIES OF THE COMIC

We have approached the problems of the comic in an unusual way. It seemed to us that jokes, which are ordinarily regarded as a sub-species of the comic, offer enough peculiarities to be attacked directly; thus we have avoided their relation to the more inclusive category of the comic so long as that was possible, though we have not failed to pick out en passant a few hints that might throw light on the comic. We have had no difficulty in discovering that socially the comic behaves differently from jokes. It can be content with two persons: a first who finds what is comic and a second in whom it is found. The third person, to whom the comic thing is told, intensifies the comic process but adds nothing new to it. In a joke this third person is indispensable for the completion of the pleasure-producing process; but on the other hand the second person may be absent, except where a tendentious, aggressive joke is concerned. A joke is made, the comic is found - and first and foremost in people, only by a subsequent transference in things, situations, and so on, as well. As regards jokes, we know that the sources of the pleasure that is to be fostered lie in the subject himself and not in outside people. We have seen, too, that jokes can sometimes re-open sources of the comic which have become inaccessible, and that the comic often serves as a façade for a joke and replaces the fore-pleasure which has otherwise to be produced by the familiar technique (p. 1739). None of this precisely suggests that the relations between jokes and the comic are very simple. On the other hand, the problems of the comic have proved so complicated and all the efforts of the philosophers at solving them have been so unsuccessful that we cannot hold out any prospect that we shall be able to master them in a sudden onslaught, as it were, by approaching them from the direction of jokes. Moreover, for our investigation of jokes we brought with us an instrument of which no one else had hitherto made use - a knowledge of the dream-work. We have no similar advantage at our command to help us to understand the comic, and we must therefore expect that we shall discover no more about the nature of the comic than what we have already found in jokes, in so far as they form part of the comic and possess in their own nature certain of its features unchanged or merely modified.

3 The type of the comic which stands nearest to jokes is the naïve. Like the comic in general, the naïve is ‘found’ and not, like a joke, ‘made’. Indeed, the naïve cannot be made at all, whereas alongside the pure comic we have to take into account the case in which something is made comic - an evocation of the comic. The naïve must arise, without our taking any part in it, in the remarks and actions of other people, who stand in the position of the second person in the comic or in jokes. The naïve occurs if someone completely disregards an inhibition because it is not present in him - if, therefore, he appears to overcome it without any effort. It is a condition for the naïve’s producing its effect that we should know that the person concerned does not possess the inhibition; otherwise we call him not naïve but impudent. We do not laugh at him but are indignant at him. The effect produced by the naïve is irresistible, and seems simple to understand. An inhibitory expenditure which we usually make suddenly becomes unutilizable owing to our hearing the naïve remark, and it is discharged by laughter. There is no need here for the attention to be distracted, probably because the lifting of the inhibition occurs directly and not through the intermediary of an operation that has been provoked. In this we are behaving like the third person in a joke, who is presented with the economy in inhibition without any effort on his own part.

In view of the insight we have gained into the genesis of inhibitions from following the course of development from play to jokes, it will not surprise us to find that the naïve occurs far the most often in children, and is then carried over to uneducated adults, whom we may regard as childish so far as their intellectual development is concerned. Naive remarks are, of course, better suited for comparison with jokes than naïve actions, since remarks and not actions are the usual form in which jokes are expressed. It is illuminating to find that naïve remarks like those made by children may also be described as ‘naïve jokes’. The conformity between jokes and naïveté, as well as the reasons for their dissimilarity, will be made clearer to us by a few examples.

A three-and-a-half-year-old girl gave this warning to her brother: ‘I say, don’t eat so much of that pudding or you’ll get ill and have to have some "Bubizin".’ ‘"Bubizin"?’ asked her mother, ‘What’s that?’ ‘When I was ill’, answered the child in self-justification, ‘I had to have some Medizin.’ The child thought that what the doctor prescribed was called ‘Mädi-zin’ when it was for a ‘Mädi’ [little girl] and concluded that if it was for a ‘Bubi

’ [little boy] it would be called ‘Bubi-zin’. This is constructed like a verbal joke working with the technique of similarity of sound, and indeed it might have occurred as a real joke, in which case we should have greeted it, half-unwillingly, with a smile. As an example of naïveté it strikes us as quite excellent and it raises a laugh. What is it that makes the difference here between a joke and something naïve? Evidently not the wording or the technique, which would be the same for both possibilities, but a factor, rather, which at first sight seems quite remote from both of them. It is merely a question of whether we assume that the speaker has intended to make a joke or whether we suppose that he - the child - has tried in good faith to draw a serious conclusion on the basis of his uncorrected ignorance. Only the latter case is one of naïveté. Here for the first time our attention is drawn to the other person putting himself into the psychical process that occurs in the person who produces the remark.

This view will be confirmed if we examine another example. A brother and sister - a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy - were performing a drama composed by themselves before an audience of uncles and aunts. The scene represented a hut by the sea-shore. In the first act the two author-actors, a poor fisherman and his honest wife, are complaining about the hard times and their small earnings. The husband decides to cross the wide seas in his boat to seek his fortune elsewhere, and, after tender farewells between the two of them, the curtain falls. The second act takes place a few years later. The fisherman has returned a wealthy man with a big bag of money; and he tells his wife, who awaits his arrival outside the hut, what good fortune he has met with in foreign lands. His wife interrupts him proudly: ‘I too have not been idle.’ And thereupon she opens the door of the hut and reveals to his eyes twelve large dolls lying asleep on the floor.... At this point in the drama the actors were interrupted by a storm of laughter from the audience, which they were unable to understand. They stared disconcerted at their fond relatives, who had behaved properly till then and had listened with eager attention. The laughter is explained on the supposition that the audience assumed that the young authors still knew nothing of the conditions governing the origin of children and were therefore able to believe that a wife could boast of the offspring born during her husband’s long absence and that a husband could rejoice with her over them. What the authors produced on the basis of this ignorance might be described as nonsense or absurdity.

A third example will show us yet another technique, the acquaintance of which we have made in jokes, in the service of the naïve. A ‘Frenchwoman’¹ was engaged as governess for a little girl, but did not meet with her personal approval. Scarcely had the newcomer left the room when the little girl gave voice to loud criticism: ‘That a Frenchwoman? She may call herself one because she once lay beside a Frenchman!’ This might have been a joke - even a tolerably good one (double meaning or allusion, with double entendre) if the child had had the slightest notion of the possibility of the double meaning. In fact she had merely transferred to the stranger she disliked a facetious way of describing a thing as ungenuine which she had often heard: ‘That genuine gold? It may once have lain beside gold.’ Owing to the child’s ignorance, which so completely altered the psychical process in her understanding hearers, her remark became a naïve one. In consequence of this condition, there is the possibility of a misleading naïveté. We may assume in the child an ignorance that no longer exists; and children often represent themselves as naïve, so as to enjoy a liberty that they would not otherwise be granted.

¹ [‘Französin.’ The ordinary term for a French governess in Austria.]5

We can illustrate from these examples the position occupied by the naïve between jokes and the comic. The naïve (in speech) agrees with jokes as regards wording and content: it brings about a misuse of words, a piece of nonsense, or a piece of smut. But the psychical process in the first person, who produces it, which raised so many interesting and puzzling questions for us in regard to jokes, is here completely absent. A naïve person thinks he has used his means of expression and trains of thought normally and simply, and he has no arrière pensée in mind; nor does he derive any yield of pleasure from producing something naïve. None of the characteristics of the naïve exist except in the apprehension of the person who hears it - a person who coincides with the third person in jokes. Moreover the person who produces it does so without any effort. The complicated technique, which in jokes is designed to paralyse the inhibition arising from rational criticism, is absent in him; he does not possess this inhibition as yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without compromise. In that respect the naïve is a marginal case of the joke; it arises if in the formula for the construction of jokes we reduce the value of the censorship to zero.

Whereas it was a condition for the effectiveness of a joke that both persons should be subject to approximately the same inhibitions or internal resistances, it will be seen that it is a condition for the naïve that the one person should possess inhibitions which the other is without. The apprehension of the naïve lies with the person provided with inhibitions, and he alone obtains the yield of pleasure which the naïve brings about. We have come near to guessing that that pleasure arises from the lifting of inhibitions. Since the pleasure from jokes has the same origin - a core of verbal pleasure and pleasure from nonsense, and a casing of pleasure in the lifting of inhibitions or in the relief of psychical expenditure - this similar relation to inhibition explains the internal kinship between the naïve and jokes. In both of them the pleasure arises through the lifting of internal inhibition.

The psychical process in the receptive person, however, is as much more complicated in the case of the naïve as it is simplified in comparison with jokes in the productive person. (In the case of the naïve, incidentally, our own self invariably coincides with the receptive person, while in the case of jokes we may equally occupy the position of the productive one.) When the receptive person hears something naïve, it must on the one hand affect him like a joke - and our examples give evidence precisely of this - for, as with a joke, the lifting of the censorship is made possible for him by no more than the effort of listening. But only a part of the pleasure created by the naïve can be explained in this way; and even this might be endangered in certain instances - for example, at hearing a naïve piece of smut. We might react to this at once with the same indignation that might be felt against a real piece of smut, if it were not that another factor spares us this indignation and at the same time offers us the more important part of our pleasure in the naïve. This other factor is the condition already mentioned that, in order to recognize the naïve, we must know that the internal inhibition is absent in the producing person. Only when this is certain do we laugh instead of being indignant. Thus we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy in expenditure which we discharge by laughing.

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