My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 20 страница

Thus the laughter would always apply to the comparison between the adult’s ego and the child’s ego. Even the lack of uniformity in the comic difference - the fact that what seems to me comic is sometimes a greater and sometimes a smaller expenditure - would fit in with the infantile determinant; actually what is comic is invariably on the infantile side.

This is not contradicted by the fact that, when children themselves are the object of the comparison, they do not give me a comic impression but a purely pleasurable one; nor is it contradicted because the comparison with the infantile only produces a comic effect if any other use of the difference is avoided. For these are matters concerned with the conditions governing discharge. Whatever brings a psychical process into connection with others operates against the discharge of the surplus cathexis and puts it to some other use; whatever isolates a psychical act encourages discharge. A conscious attitude to children as objects of comparison therefore makes impossible the discharge that is necessary for comic pleasure. Only when the cathexis is preconscious is there an approximation to an isolation such as, incidentally, we may ascribe to the mental processes in children as well. The addition to the comparison (‘I did it like that as a child too’) from which the comic effect is derived would thus only come into consideration, as far as differences of medium magnitude are concerned, if no other nexus could gain control over the liberated surplus.

If we pursue our attempt to discover the essence of the comic in a preconscious link with the infantile, we must go a step further than Bergson and admit that a comparison need not, in order to produce the comic, arouse old childish pleasures and childish play; it will be enough for it to touch upon childish nature in general, and perhaps even on childish suffering. Here we shall be parting from Bergson but remaining in agreement with ourselves if we connect comic pleasure not with recollected pleasure but once more with a comparison. It may be that cases of the former kind may coincide with the invariably and irresistibly comic.

Let us at this point review the scheme which we drew up earlier of the various comic possibilities. We remarked that the comic difference was found either

(a) by a comparison between another person and oneself, or

(b) by a comparison entirely within the other person, or

(c) by a comparison entirely within oneself.

In the first of these cases the other person would appear to me as a child; in the second he would reduce himself to a child; and in the third I should discover the child in myself.

The first case would include the comic of movement and form, of mental functioning and of character. The corresponding infantile factors would be the urge to movement and the child’s inferior mental and moral development. So that, for instance, a stupid person would be comic to me in so far as he reminded me of a lazy child and a bad person in so far as he reminded me of a naughty child. There could only be a question of a childish pleasure lost to adults in the single instance in which the child’s own joy in movement was concerned.

The second case, in which the comic depends entirely on ‘empathy’, includes the most numerous possibilities - the comic of situation, of exaggeration (caricature), of mimicry, of degradation and of unmasking. This is the case in which the introduction of the infantile point of view proves most useful. For the comic of situation is mostly based on embarrassments, in which we rediscover the child’s helplessness. The worst of the embarrassments, the interference by the peremptory demands of natural needs with other functions, corresponds to the child’s incomplete control over his bodily functions. Where the comic of situation operates by means of repetitions, it is based on the child’s peculiar pleasure in constant repetition (of questions or of being told stories) which make him a nuisance to the adult. Exaggeration, which still gives pleasure to adults in so far as it can find justification with their critical faculty, is connected with the child’s peculiar lack of a sense of proportion, his ignorance of all quantitative relations, which he comes to know later than qualitative ones. The use of moderation and restraint, even in the case of permitted impulses, is a late fruit of education and is acquired by the mutual inhibition of mental activities brought together in a combination. Where such combinations are weakened, as in the unconscious of dreams or in the mono-ideism of psychoneuroses, the child’s lack of moderation re-emerges.

We found relatively great difficulties in understanding the comic of mimicry so long as we left the infantile factor out of account. But mimicry is the child’s best art and the driving motive of most of his games. A child’s ambition aims far less at excelling among his equals than at mimicking the grown-ups. The relation of children to adults is also the basis of the comic of degradation, which corresponds to the condescension shown by adults in their attitude to the life of children. There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal. This relief, which gives the child pure pleasure, becomes in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making things comic and a source of comic pleasure. As regards unmasking, we know that it goes back to degradation.

We come up against the most difficulties in finding the infantile basis of the third case, the comic of expectation, which no doubt explains why those authorities who have put this case first in their discussion of the comic have found no occasion for taking account of the infantile factor in the comic. The comic of expectation is no doubt the remotest in children; the capacity to grasp it is the latest to appear. In most of the instances which seem comic to an adult a child would probably feel only disappointment. We might, however, take the child’s power of blissful expectation and credulity as a basis for understanding how we appear to ourselves comic ‘as a child’ when we meet with a comic disappointment.

What we have said would seem to suggest a certain probability for a translation of the comic feeling that might run; ‘Those things are comic which are not proper for an adult.’ Nevertheless I do not feel bold enough, in virtue of my whole attitude to the problem of the comic, to defend this last assertion with as much seriousness as my earlier ones. I am unable to decide whether degradation to being a child is only a special case of comic degradation, or whether everything comic is based fundamentally on degradation to being a child.¹

¹ The fact that comic pleasure has its source in the ‘quantitative contrast’ of a comparison between small and large, which after all also expresses the essential relation between a child and an adult - this would certainly be a strange coincidence if the comic had no other connection with the infantile.3 An enquiry which deals with the comic, however cursorily, would be seriously incomplete if it did not find room for at least a few remarks about humour. The essential kinship between the two is so little open to doubt that an attempt at explaining the comic is bound to make at least some contribution to an understanding of humour. However much that is pertinent and impressive may have been brought forward in the appreciation of humour (which, itself one of the highest psychical achievements, enjoys the particular favour of thinkers), yet we cannot evade an attempt at giving expression to its nature by an approach to the formulas for jokes and for the comic.

We have seen that the release of distressing affects is the greatest obstacle to the emergence of the comic. As soon as the aimless movement does damage, or the stupidity leads to mischief, or the disappointment causes pain, the possibility of a comic effect is at an end. This is true, at all events, for a person who cannot ward off such unpleasure, who is himself its victim or is obliged to have a share in it; whereas a person who is not concerned shows by his demeanour that the situation involved contains everything that is required for a comic effect. Now humour is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it; it acts as a substitute for the generation of these affects, it puts itself in their place. The conditions for its appearance are given if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi. In the cases that have just been mentioned the person who is the victim of the injury, pain, and so on, might obtain humorous pleasure, while the unconcerned person laughs from comic pleasure. The pleasure of humour, if this is so, comes about - we cannot say otherwise - at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur: it arises from an economy in the expenditure of affect.

Humour is the most easily satisfied among the species of the comic. It completes its course within a single person; another person’s participation adds nothing new to it. I can keep to myself the enjoyment of the humorous pleasure that has arisen in me, without feeling obliged to communicate it. It is not easy to say what happens in a person when humorous pleasure is generated; but we can obtain some insight if we examine the cases in which humour is communicated or sympathized with, cases in which, by an understanding of the humorous person, we arrive at the same pleasure as his. The crudest case of humour - what is known as Galgenhumor - may be instructive in this connection. A rogue who was being led out to execution on a Monday remarked: ‘Well, this week’s beginning nicely.’ This is actually a joke, since the remark is quite apt in itself, but on the other hand, is misplaced in a nonsensical way, since for the man himself there would be no further events that week. But humour is concerned in the making of such a joke - that is, in disregarding what it is that distinguishes the beginning of this week from others, in denying the distinction which might give rise to motives for quite special emotions. The case was the same when the rogue on his way to execution asked for a scarf for his bare throat so as not to catch cold - an otherwise laudable precaution but one which, in view of what lay in store so shortly for the neck, was remarkably superfluous and unimportant. It must be confessed that there is something like magnanimity in this blague, in the man’s tenacious hold upon his customary self and his disregard of what might overthrow that self and drive it to despair. This kind of grandeur of humour appears unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humorous person.

In Victor Hugo’s Hernani, the bandit who has become involved in a conspiracy against his King, Charles I of Spain (the Emperor Charles V), has fallen into the hands of this powerful enemy. He foresees that, convicted of high treason, it is his fate to lose his head. But this fore-knowledge does not prevent his letting himself be known as a Hereditary Grandee of Spain and declaring that he has no intention of renouncing any of the privileges that are his due. A Grandee of Spain might cover his head in the presence of his royal master. Very well, then:

.... Nos têtes ont le droit

De tomber couvertes devant de toi.¹

This is humour on the grand scale, and if when we hear it we do not laugh, that is because our admiration covers the humorous pleasure. In the case of the rogue who refuses to catch cold on the way to execution we laugh heartily. The situation that ought to drive the criminal to despair might rouse intense pity in us; but that pity is inhibited because we understand that he, who is more closely concerned, makes nothing of the situation. As a result of this understanding, the expenditure on the pity, which was already prepared, becomes unutilizable and we laugh it off. We are, as it were, infected by the rogue’s indifference - though we notice that it has cost him a great expenditure of psychical work.

An economy of pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure. Mark Twain’s humour usually works with his mechanism. In an account of his brother’s life, for instance, he tells us how he was at one time employed on a great road-making enterprise. The premature explosion of a mine blew him up into the air and he came down again far away from the place where he had been working. We are bound to have feelings of sympathy for the victim of the accident and would like to ask whether he was injured by it. But when the story goes on to say that his brother had a half-day’s wages deducted for being ‘absent from his place of employment’ we are entirely distracted from our pity and become almost as hard-hearted as the contractor and almost as indifferent to possible damage to the brother’s health. On another occasion Mark Twain presents us with his family tree, which he traces back to one of Columbus’s fellow-voyagers. He then describes this ancestor’s character and how his baggage consisted entirely of a number of pieces of washing each of which had a different laundry-mark - here we cannot help laughing at the cost of an economy of the feelings of piety into which we were prepared to enter at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of the humorous pleasure is not interfered with by our knowledge that this pedigree is a fictitious one and that the fiction serves the satirical purpose of exposing the embellishments in similar accounts by other people: it is as independent of the condition that it must be real as in the case of making things comic. In yet another story, Mark Twain describes how his brother constructed a subterranean dwelling, into which he brought a bed, a table and a lamp and which he roofed over with a large piece of sailcloth with a hole in the middle. At night, however, after the hut was finished, a cow that was being driven home fell through the opening of the roof on to the table and put out the lamp. His brother patiently helped to get the beast out and put the establishment to rights again. Next night the same interruption was repeated and his brother behaved as before. And so it was every following night. Repetition makes the story comic, but Mark Twain ends it by reporting that on the forty-sixth night, when the cow fell through again, his brother finally remarked: ‘The thing’s beginning to get monotonous.’ At this our humorous pleasure cannot be kept back, for what we had long expected to hear was that this obstinate set of misfortunes would make his brother angry. And indeed the small contributions of humour that we produce ourselves are as a rule made at the cost of anger - instead of getting angry.²

¹ [‘Our heads have the right to fall before you covered.’]

² The grandiose humorous effect of a figure like that of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff rests on an economy in contempt and indignation. We recognize him as an undeserving gormandizer and swindler, but our condenmation is disarmed by a whole number of factors. We can see that he knows himself as well as we do; he impresses us by his wit, and, besides this, his physical misproportion has the effect of encouraging us to take a comic view of him instead of a serious one, as though the demands of morality and honour must rebound from so fat a stomach. His doings are on the whole harmless, and are almost excused by the comic baseness of the people he cheats. We admit that the poor fellow has a right to try to live and enjoy himself like anyone else, and we almost pity him because in the chief situations we find him a plaything in the hands of someone far his superior. So we cannot feel angry with him and we add all that we economize in indignation with him to the comic pleasure which he affords us apart from this. Sir John’s own humour arises in fact from the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its cheerfulness and assurance.

The ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is, on the contrary, a figure who possesses no humour himself but who with his seriousness offers us a pleasure which could be called humorous, though its mechanism shows an important divergence from that of humour. Don Quixote is originally a purely comic figure, a big child; the phantasies from his books of chivalry have gone to his head. It is well known that to begin with the author intended nothing else of him and that his creation gradually grew far beyond its creator’s first intentions. But after the author had equipped this ridiculous figure with the deepest wisdom and the noblest purposes and had made him into the symbolic representative of an idealism which believes in the realization of its aims and takes duties seriously and takes promises literally, this figure ceased to have a comic effect. Just as in other cases humorous pleasure arises from the prevention of an emotion, so it does here from the interference with comic pleasure. But it is clear that these examples have already carried us a long way from the simple cases of humour.

The species of humour are extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain, tenderness, and so on. Their number seems to remain uncompleted because the kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour, in making them, by devices like those in the examples we have given, into sources of humorous pleasure. The artists in Simplicissismus, for instance, have had astonishing results in achieving humour at the cost of horror and disgust. The forms in which humour is manifested are, moreover, determined by two peculiarities which are connected with the conditions under which it is generated. Humour may, in the first place, appear merged with a joke or some other species of the comic; in that case its task is to get rid of a possibility implicit in the situation that an affect may be generated which would interfere with the pleasurable outcome. In the second place, it may stop this generating of an affect entirely or only partially; this last is actually the commoner case since it is easier to bring about, and it produces the various forms of ‘broken’¹ humour - the humour that smiles through tears. It withdraws a part of its energy from the affect and in exchange gives it a tinge of humour.

The humorous pleasure derived from sympathy originates, as can be seen from the examples above, from a peculiar technique comparable to displacement, by means of which the release of affect that is already in preparation is disappointed and the cathexis diverted on to something else, often on to something of secondary importance. But this does not help us at all to understand the process by which the displacement away from the generating of affect takes place in the humorous person himself. We can see that the receiver imitates the creator of the humour in his mental processes, but this tells us nothing of the forces which make the process possible in the latter.

¹ A term which is used in quite another sense in Vischer’s aesthetics.7

We can only say that if someone succeeds, for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by reflecting on the greatness of the interests of the world as compared with his own smallness, we do not regard this as an achievement of humour but of philosophical thought, and if we put ourselves into his train of thought, we obtain no yield of pleasure. Humorous displacement is thus just as impossible under the glare of conscious attention as is comic comparison; like the latter, it is tied to the condition of remaining preconscious or automatic.

We can gain some information about humorous displacement if we look at it in the light of a defensive process. Defensive processes are the psychical correlative of the flight reflex and perform the task of preventing the generation of unpleasure from internal sources. In fulfilling this task they serve mental events as an automatic regulation, which in the end, incidentally, turns out to be detrimental and has to be subjected to conscious thinking. I have indicated one particular form of this defence, repression that has failed, as the operative mechanism for the development of psychoneuroses. Humour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defence. It brings this about by finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it, by discharge, into pleasure. It is even conceivable that once again it may be a connection with the infantile that puts the means for achieving this at its disposal. Only in childhood have there been distressing affects at which the adult would smile to-day - just as he laughs, as a humorist, at his present distressing affects. The exaltation of his ego, to which the humorous displacement bears witness, and of which the translation would no doubt be ‘I am too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things’, might well be derived from his comparing his present ego with his childish one. This view is to some extent supported by the part played by the infantile in neurotic processes of repression.

On the whole humour is closer to the comic than to jokes. It shares with the former its psychical localization in the preconscious whereas jokes, as we have had to suppose, are formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the preconscious. On the other hand humour does not participate in a peculiar characteristic common to jokes and the comic, on which we have perhaps not yet laid sufficient stress. It is a necessary condition for generating the comic that we should be obliged, simultaneously or in rapid succession, to apply to one and the same act of ideation two different ideational methods, between which the ‘comparison’ is then made and the comic difference emerges. Differences in expenditure of this kind arise between that belongs to someone else and to oneself, between what is as usual and what has been changed, between what is expected and what happens.¹ In the case of jokes, the difference between two simultaneous methods of viewing things, which operate with a different expenditure, applies to the process in the person who hears the joke. One of these two views, following the hints contained in the joke, passes along the path of thought through the unconscious; the other stays on the surface and views the joke like any other wording that has emerged from the preconscious and become conscious. We should perhaps be justified in representing the pleasure from a joke that is heard as being derived from the difference between these two methods of viewing it.² Here we are saying of jokes what we described as their possessing a Janus head, while the relation between jokes and the comic had still to be cleared up.³

¹ If we are prepared to do a little violence to the concept of ‘expectation’, we can, following Lipps, include a very large region of the comic under the comic of expectation. But what are probably the most basic instances of the comic, those arising from a comparison between someone else’s expenditure and one’s own, would be the very ones that fitted in least easily to this grouping.

² We can accept this formula without question, since it leads to nothing that would contradict our earlier discussions. The difference between the two expenditures must in essence come down to the inhibitory expenditure that is saved. The lack of this economy in inhibition in the case of the comic, and the absence of quantitative contrast in the case of jokes, would determine the distinction between the comic feeling and the impression of a joke, in spite of their agreeing in the characteristic of using two kinds of ideational activity for the same view.

³ This peculiarity of the ‘double face’ [in French in the original] has naturally not escaped the authorities. Mélinand (1895), from whom I have borrowed this phrase, states the determinants of laughter in the following formula: ‘Ce qui fait rire c’est ce qui est à la fois, d’un côté, absurde et de l’autre, familier.’ [‘What makes one laugh is what is on the one hand absurd, and on the other familiar.’] This formula fits jokes better than the comic, but does not completely cover the former either. - Bergson (1900, 98) defines the comic situation by the ‘interférence des séries’: ‘Une situation est toujours comique quand elle appartient en même temps à deux séries d’événements absolument indépendantes, et qu’elle peut s’interpréter à la fois dans deux sens tout différents.’ [‘A situation is always comic when it belongs at the same time to two series of events that are absolutely independent, and where it can be interpreted simultaneously in two quite different senses.’] - Lipps regards the comic as ‘the bigness and smallness of the same thing’.

In the case of humour the characteristic which we have just brought forward becomes effaced. It is true that we feel humorous pleasure when an emotion is avoided which we should have expected because it usually accompanies the situation, and to that extent humour too comes under the extended concept of the comic of expectation. But with humour it is no longer a question of two different methods of viewing the same subject matter. The fact that the situation is dominated by the emotion that is to be avoided, which is of an unpleasurable character, puts an end to the possibility of comparing it with the characteristics of the comic and of jokes. Humorous displacement is in fact a case of a liberated expenditure being used elsewhere - a case which has been shown to be so perilous to a comic effect.

We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity. For the euphoria which we endeavour to reach by these means is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy - the mood of our childhood, when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life.

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