Freud - Complete Works (307 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1741

   It now begins to dawn on us that
the technique of jokes is in general determined by two sorts of
purposes - those that make the construction of the joke possible in
the first person and those that are intended to guarantee the joke
the greatest possible pleasurable effect on the third person. The
Janus-like, two-way-facing character of jokes, which protects their
original yield of pleasure from the attacks of critical reason, and
the mechanism of fore-pleasure belong to the first of these
purposes; the further complication of the technique by the
conditions that have been enumerated in the present chapter takes
place out of regard for the joke’s third person. A joke is
thus a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once.
Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated
with an eye to the third person, as though there were internal and
unsurmountable obstacles to it in the first person. And this gives
us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for
the completion of the joking process. But whereas we have been able
to obtain a fairly good insight into the nature of this process in
the third person, the corresponding process in the first person
seems still to be veiled in obscurity. Of the two questions we
asked, ‘Why are we unable to laugh at a joke we have made
ourselves?’ and ‘Why are we driven to tell our own joke
to someone else?’, the first has so far evaded our reply. We
can only suspect that there is an intimate connection between the
two facts that have to be explained: that we are compelled to tell
our joke to someone else
because
we are unable to laugh at
it ourselves. Our insight into the conditions for obtaining and
discharging pleasure which prevail in the
third
person
enables us to infer as regards the
first
person that in him
the conditions for discharge are lacking and those for obtaining
pleasure only incompletely fulfilled. That being so, it cannot be
disputed that we supplement our pleasure by attaining the laughter
that is impossible for us by the roundabout path of the impression
we have of the person who has been made to laugh. As Dugas has put
it, we laugh as it were ‘
par ricochet
[on the
rebound]’. Laughter is among the highly infectious
expressions of psychical states. When I make the other person laugh
by telling him my joke, I am actually making use of him to arouse
my own laughter; and one can in fact observe that a person who has
begun by telling a joke with a serious face afterwards joins in the
other person’s laughter with a moderate laugh. Accordingly,
telling my joke to another person would seem to serve several
purposes: first, to give me objective certainty that the joke-work
has been successful; secondly, to complete my own pleasure by a
reaction from the other person upon myself; and thirdly - where it
is a question of repeating a joke that one has not produced oneself
- to make up for the loss of pleasure owing to the joke’s
lack of novelty.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1742

   At the conclusion of these
discussions of the psychical processes in jokes in so far as they
take place between two persons, we may glance back at the factor of
economy, which has been in our mind as being of importance in
arriving at a psychological view of jokes ever since our first
explanation of their technique. We have long since abandoned the
most obvious but simplest view of this economy - that it is a
question of an avoidance of psychical expenditure in general, such
as would be involved by the greatest possible restriction in the
use of words and in the establishment of chains of thought. Even at
that stage we told ourselves that being concise or laconic was not
enough to make a joke. A joke’s brevity is of a peculiar kind
- ‘joking’ brevity. It is true that the original yield
of pleasure, produced by playing with words and thoughts, was
derived from mere economy in expenditure; but with the development
of play into a joke the tendency to economy too must alter its
aims, for the amount that would be saved by the use of the same
word or the avoidance of a new way of joining ideas together would
certainly count for nothing as compared with the immense
expenditure on our intellectual activity. I may perhaps venture on
a comparison between psychical economy and a business enterprise.
So long as the turnover in the business is very small, the
important thing is that outlay in general shall be kept low and
administrative costs restricted to the minimum. Economy is
concerned with the absolute height of expenditure. Later, when the
business has expanded, the importance of the administrative cost
diminishes; the height reached by the amount of expenditure is no
longer of significance provided that the turnover and profits can
be sufficiently increased. It would be niggling, and indeed
positively detrimental, to be conservative over expenditure on the
administration of the business. Nevertheless it would be wrong to
assume that when expenditure was absolutely great there would be no
room left for the tendency to economy. The mind of the manager, if
it is inclined to economy, will now turn to economy over details.
He will feel satisfaction if a piece of work can be carried out at
smaller cost than previously, however small the saving may seem to
be in comparison with the size of the total expenditure. In a quite
analogous fashion, in our complex psychical business too, economy
in detail remains a source of pleasure, as may be seen from
everyday happenings. Anyone who used to have his room lighted by
gas and has now had electricity installed will for quite a time be
aware of a definite feeling of pleasure when he switches on the
electric light; he will feel it as long as the memory is revived in
him at that moment of the complicated manoeuvres that were
necessary for lighting the gas. Similarly, the economies in
psychical inhibitory expenditure brought about by a joke - though
they are small in comparison with our total psychical expenditure -
will remain a source of pleasure for us because they save us a
particular expenditure which we have been accustomed to make and
which we were already prepared to make on this occasion as well.
The factor of the expenditure’s being one that was expected
and prepared for moves unmistakably into the foreground.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1743

   A localized economy, such as we
have just been considering, will not fail to give us momentary
pleasure; but it will not bring a lasting relief so long as what
has been saved at this point can be put to use elsewhere. It is
only if this disposal elsewhere can be avoided that this
specialized economy is transformed into a general relief of
psychical expenditure. Thus, as we come to a better understanding
of the psychical processes of jokes, the factor of relief takes the
place of economy. It is obvious that the former gives a greater
feeling of pleasure. The process in the joke’s first person
produces pleasure by lifting inhibition and diminishing local
expenditure; but it seems not to come to rest until, through the
intermediary of the interpolated third person, it achieves general
relief through discharge.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1744

C.  THEORETIC PART

VI

THE
RELATION OF JOKES TO DREAMS AND TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

At the end of the chapter in which I was
concerned with discovering the technique of jokes, I remarked (
p. 1686 f.
) that the processes of
condensation, with or without the formation of substitutes, of
representation by nonsense and by the opposite, of indirect
representation, and so on, which, as we found, play a part in
producing jokes, show a very far-reaching agreement with the
processes of the ‘dream-work’. I further promised on
the one hand that we would study these similarities more closely
and on the other hand that we would examine the common element in
jokes and dreams which seems to be thus suggested. It would be much
easier for me to carry out this comparison if I could assume that
one of the two objects of comparison - the ‘dream-work’
- was already familiar to my readers. But it will probably be wiser
not to make that assumption. I have an impression that my
Interpretation of Dreams
, published in 1900, provoked more
‘bewilderment’ than ‘enlightenment’ among
my fellow-specialists; and I know that wider circles of readers
have been content to reduce the contents of the book to a
catch-word (‘wish-fulfilment’) which can be easily
remembered and conveniently misused.

   Continued concern with the
problems treated there - for which my medical practice as a
psychotherapist has given me abundant opportunity - has not brought
me up against anything that might have called for alterations or
improvements in my lines of thought; I can therefore wait quietly
till my readers’ understanding catches up with me or till
judicious criticism has shown me the fundamental errors in my view.
For the purpose of making the comparison with jokes, I will now
repeat, briefly and concisely, the most essential information about
dreams and the dream-work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

 
1745

   We know a dream from what seems
as a rule a fragmentary memory of it which we have after waking. It
appears as a mesh-work of sense-impressions, mostly visual but also
of other kinds, which have simulated an experience, and with which
thought-processes (‘knowledge’ in the dream) and
expressions of affect may be mingled. What we thus remember of the
dream I call ‘
the dream’s manifest
content
’. It is often entirely absurd and confused -
sometimes only the one or the other. But even if it is quite
coherent, as it is in the case of some anxiety-dreams, it confronts
our mental life as something alien, for whose origin one cannot in
any way account. The explanation of these characteristics of dreams
has hitherto been looked for in dreams themselves, by regarding
them as indications of a disordered, dissociated and so to say
‘sleepy’ activity of the nervous elements.

   I have on the contrary shown that
this strange ‘manifest’ content of the dream can
regularly be made intelligible as a mutilated and altered
transcript of certain rational psychical structures which deserve
the name of ‘
latent dream-thoughts
’. We arrive
at a knowledge of these by dividing the dream’s manifest
content into its component parts, without considering any apparent
meaning it may have, and by then following the associative threads
which start from each of what are now isolated elements. These
interweave with one another and finally lead to a tissue of
thoughts which are not only perfectly rational but can also be
easily fitted into the known context of our mental processes. In
the course of this ‘analysis’, the content of the dream
will have cast off all the peculiarities that puzzled us. But if
the analysis is to succeed, we must, while it proceeds, firmly
reject the critical objections which will unceasingly arise to the
reproduction of the various intermediary associations.

   A comparison of the recollected
manifest content of the dream with the latent dream-thoughts thus
discovered gives rise to the concept of the
‘dream-work’. The dream-work is the name for the whole
sum of transforming processes which have converted the
dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. The surprise with which we
formerly regarded the dream now attaches to the dream-work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1746

   The achievements of the
dream-work can, however, be described as follows. A tissue of
thoughts, usually a very complicated one, which has been built up
during the day and has not been completely dealt with - ‘a
day’s residue’ - continues during the night to retain
the quota of energy - the ‘interest’- claimed by it,
and threatens to disturb sleep. This ‘day’s
residue’ is transformed by the dream-work into a dream and
made innocuous to sleep. In order to provide a fulcrum for the
dream-work, the ‘day’s residue’ must be capable
of constructing a wish - which is not a very hard condition to
fulfil. The wish arising from the dream-thoughts forms the
preliminary stage and later the core of the dream. Experience
derived from analyses - and not the theory of dreams - informs us
that in children any wish left over from waking life is sufficient
to call up a dream, which emerges as connected and ingenious but
usually short, and which is easily recognized as a
‘wish-fulfilment’. In the case of adults it seems to be
a generally binding condition that the wish which creates the dream
shall be one that is alien to conscious thinking - a repressed wish
- or will possibly at least have reinforcements that are unknown to
consciousness. Without assuming the existence of the unconscious in
the sense explained above, I should not be able to develop the
theory of dreams further or to interpret the material met with in
dream-analyses. The action of this unconscious wish upon the
consciously rational material of the dream-thoughts produces the
dream. While this happens, the dream is, as it were, dragged down
into the unconscious, or, more precisely, is submitted to a
treatment such as is met with at the level of unconscious
thought-processes and is characteristic of that level. Hitherto it
is only from the results of the ‘dream-work’ that we
are in fact acquainted with the characteristics of unconscious
thinking and its differences from thinking that is capable of
becoming conscious - ‘preconscious’ thinking.