Freud - Complete Works (309 page)

   Jokes possess yet another
characteristic which fits satisfactorily into the view of the
joke-work which we have derived from dreams. We speak, it is true,
of ‘making’ a joke; but we are aware that when we do so
our behaviour is different from what it is when we make a judgement
or make an objection. A joke has quite outstandingly the
characteristic of being a notion that has occurred to us
‘involuntarily’. What happens is not that we know a
moment beforehand what joke we are going to make, and that all it
then needs is to be clothed in words. We have an indefinable
feeling, rather, which I can best compare with an
‘
absence
’¹, a sudden release of
intellectual tension, and then all at once the joke is there - as a
rule ready-clothed in words. Some of the techniques of jokes can be
employed apart from them in the expression of a thought - for
instance, the techniques of analogy or allusion. I can deliberately
decide to make an allusion. In such a case I begin by having a
direct expression of my thought in my mind (in my inner ear); I
inhibit myself from expressing it owing to a misgiving related to
the external situation, and can almost be said to make up my mind
to replace the direct expression by another form of indirect
expression; and I then produce an allusion. But the allusion which
arises in this way and which is formed under my continuous
supervision is never a joke, however serviceable it may be in other
ways. A joking allusion, on the other hand, emerges without my
being able to follow these preparatory stages in my thoughts. I
will not attach too much importance to this behaviour; it is
scarcely decisive, though it agrees well with our hypothesis that
in the formation of a joke one drops a train of thought for a
moment and that it then suddenly emerges from the unconscious as a
joke.

  
¹
[The French term.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1753

   Jokes show a special way of
behaving, too, in regard to association. Often they are not at the
disposal of our memory when we want them; but at other times, to
make up for this, they appear involuntarily, as it were, and at
points in our train of thought where we cannot see their relevance.
These, again, are only small features, but nevertheless indicate
their origin from the unconscious.

   Let us now bring together those
characteristics of jokes which can be referred to their formation
in the unconscious. First and foremost there is the peculiar
brevity of jokes - not, indeed, an essential, but an extremely
distinctive feature. When we first came across it, we were inclined
to regard it as an expression of the tendency to economy, but
abandoned this view ourselves owing to obvious objections. It now
seems to us rather a mark of the unconscious revision to which the
joke-thought has been subjected. For we cannot connect what
corresponds to it in dreams, condensation, with any factor other
than localization in the unconscious; and we must suppose that the
determinants for such condensations, which are absent in the
preconscious, are present in the unconscious thought-process.¹
It is to be expected that in the process of condensation a few of
the elements subjected to it will be lost, while others, which take
over the cathectic energy of the former, will become intensified or
over-intensified through the condensation. Thus the brevity of
jokes, like that of dreams, would be a necessary concomitant of the
condensations which occur in both of them - in both cases a result
of the process of condensation. This origin would also account for
the special character of the brevity of jokes, a character that
cannot be further defined but which is felt as a striking one.

  
¹
Apart from the dream-work and the technique
of jokes, there is another kind of mental event in which I have
been able to show that condensation is a regular and important
process: namely the mechanism of normal (non-tendentious)
forgetting. Unique impressions offer difficulties to forgetting;
those that are analogous in any way are forgotten by being
condensed in regard to their points of resemblance. Confusion
between analogous impressions is one of the preliminary stages of
forgetting.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1754

   In an earlier passage (
p. 1715
) we regarded one of the outcomes
of condensation - multiple use of the same material, play upon
words, and similarity of sound - as a localized economy, and the
pleasure produced by an (innocent) joke as derived from that
economy, and later we inferred that the original intention of jokes
was to obtain a yield of pleasure of this kind from words - a thing
which had been permitted at the stage of play but had been dammed
up by rational criticism in the course of intellectual development.
We have now adopted the hypothesis that condensations of this kind,
such as serve the technique of jokes, arise automatically, without
any particular intention, during thought-processes in the
unconscious. Have we not before us here two different views of the
same fact which seem incompatible with each other? I do not think
so. It is true that they are two different views, and that they
need to be brought into harmony with each other; but they are not
contradictory. One of them is merely foreign to the other; and when
we have established a connection between them, we shall probably
have made some advance in knowledge. The fact that such
condensations are sources for a yield of pleasure is far from
incompatible with the hypothesis that conditions for their
production are easily found in the unconscious. We can, on the
contrary, see a reason for the plunge into the unconscious in the
circumstance that the pleasure-yielding condensations of which
jokes are in need arise there easily. There are, moreover, two
other factors which at a first glance seem to be completely foreign
to each other and to have come together as though by some undesired
chance, but which on deeper investigation turn out to be intimately
linked and indeed essentially one. I have in mind the two
assertions that, on the one hand, jokes during their development at
the stage of play (that is, during the childhood of reason) are
able to bring about these pleasurable condensations and that, on
the other hand, at higher stages they accomplish the same effect by
plunging the thought into the unconscious. For the infantile is the
source of the unconscious, and the unconscious thought-processes
are none other than those - the one and only ones - produced in
early childhood. The thought which, with the intention of
constructing a joke, plunges into the unconscious is merely seeking
there for the ancient dwelling-place of its former play with words.
Thought is put back for a moment to the stage of childhood so as
once more to gain possession of the childish source of pleasure. If
we did not already know it from research into the psychology of the
neuroses, we should be led by jokes to a suspicion that the strange
unconscious revision is nothing else than the infantile type of
thought-activity. It is merely that it is not very easy for us to
catch a glimpse in children of this infantile way of thinking, with
its peculiarities that are retained in the unconscious of adults,
because it is for the most part corrected, as it were,
in statu
nascendi
. But in a number of cases we succeed in doing so, and
we then laugh at the children’s ‘silliness’. Any
uncovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in
general as ‘comic’.¹

  
¹
Many of my neurotic patients who are under
psycho-analytic treatment are regularly in the habit of confirming
the fact by a laugh when I have succeeded in giving a faithful
picture of their hidden unconscious to their conscious perception;
and they laugh even when the content of what is unveiled would by
no means justify this. This is subject, of course, to their having
arrived close enough to the unconscious material to grasp it after
the doctor has detected it and presented it to them.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1755

   It is easier to perceive the
characteristics of these unconscious thought-processes in the
remarks made by sufferers from certain mental diseases. We should
most probably be able (as Griesinger suggested long ago) to
understand the deliria of the insane and to make use of them as
pieces of information, if we ceased to apply the demands of
conscious thinking to them and if we treated them, like dreams,
with our interpretative technique.¹ Indeed we have confirmed
the fact that ‘there is a return of the mind in dreams to an
embryonic point of view’.²

   We have entered so closely, in
connection with the processes of condensation, into the importance
of the analogy between jokes and dreams that we may be briefer in
what follows. As we know, the displacements in the dream-work point
to the operation of the censorship of conscious thinking, and
accordingly, when we come across displacement among the techniques
of jokes, we shall be inclined to suppose that an inhibitory force
plays a part in the formation of jokes as well. And we already know
that this is quite generally the case. The effort made by jokes to
recover the old pleasure in nonsense or the old pleasure in words
finds itself inhibited in normal moods by objections raised by
critical reason; and in every individual case this has to be
overcome. But the manner in which the joke-work accomplishes this
task shows a sweeping distinction between jokes and dreams. In the
dream-work it is habitually accomplished by displacements, by the
selection of ideas which are sufficiently remote from the
objectionable one for the censorship to allow them to pass, but
which are nevertheless derivatives of that idea and have taken over
its psychical cathexis by means of a complete transference. For
this reason displacements are never absent in a dream and are far
more comprehensive.

   Among displacements are to be
counted not merely diversions from a train of thought but every
sort of indirect representation as well, and in particular the
replacement of an important but objectionable element by one that
is indifferent and that appears innocent to the censorship,
something that seems like a very remote allusion to the other one -
substitution by a piece of symbolism, or an analogy, or something
small. It cannot be disputed that portions of such indirect
representation are already present in the dream’s
preconscious thoughts - for instance, representation by symbols or
analogies - because otherwise the thought would not have reached
the stage of preconscious expression at all. Indirect
representations of this kind, and allusions whose reference to the
thing intended is easy to discover, are indeed permissible and
much-used methods of expression in our conscious thinking as well.
The dream-work, however, exaggerates this method of indirect
expression beyond all bounds. Under the pressure of the censorship,
any sort of connection is good enough to serve as a substitute by
allusion, and displacement is allowed from any element to any
other. Replacement of internal associations (similarity, causal
connection, etc.) by what are known as external ones (simultaneity
in time, contiguity in space, similarity of sound) is quite
specially striking and characteristic of the dream-work.

  
¹
In doing so we should not forget to take
into account the distortion due to the censorship which is still at
work even in psychoses.

 
 
²
The
Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1756

   All these methods of displacement
appear too as techniques of joking. But when they appear, they
usually respect the limits imposed on their employment in conscious
thinking; and they may be altogether absent, although jokes too
have invariably a task to accomplish of dealing with an inhibition.
We can understand the subordinate place taken by displacements in
the joke-work when we recall that jokes always have another
technique at their command for keeping off inhibition and indeed
that we have found nothing more characteristic of them than
precisely this technique. For jokes do not, like dreams, create
compromises; they do not evade the inhibition, but they insist on
maintaining play with words or with nonsense unaltered. They
restrict themselves, however, to a choice of occasions in which
this play or this nonsense can at the same time appear allowable
(in jests) or sensible (in jokes), thanks to the ambiguity of words
and the multiplicity of conceptual relations. Nothing distinguishes
jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this
double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech. From this point of
view at least the authorities come closest to an understanding of
the nature of jokes when they lay stress on ‘sense in
nonsense’.

   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.