Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

First published:Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, 1905 (English translation, 1916)

Type of work: Psychology

Form and Content

Sigmund Freud’s specific plans for a psychoanalytic study of wit and verbal humor probably began when his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, after reading the proofs of Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913), complained that the dreams in the book were too full of jokes. It is probable, however, that Freud had considered the importance of jokes even before the publication of the dream book. In an earlier letter to Fliess, Freud had mentioned that he had been putting together a collection of Jewish anecdotes and humorous stories; it was a form to which he was naturally drawn because of his father’s fascination with such tales.

Like The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (which has also been translated as Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) is a classic example of his ability to perceive the psychological significance of those aspects of human life which many people ignore as trivial, common, or obvious. The book combines formal scholarly research with Freud’s unrelenting, although often informal, Socratic technique of analyzing data and formulating hypotheses, which are then either dismissed for lack of clarity or polished until theoretically and empirically sound. Thus, the book often reads more like a recapitulation of Freud’s thought processes than a flat statement of the conclusions themselves.

The study is divided into three major sections: an analytic part which focuses on the technique of making jokes and their purposes; a synthetic part which deals with both the origins of jokes in human pleasure and their social motives; and a theoretical part which considers the relation of jokes to dreams and the unconscious and shows how jokes are related to the broader area of the comic. As is typical of a formal academic study, the work also includes a brief review of previous research on wit and humor as well as a bibliography of works consulted and cited.

Although the book is characterized by Freud’s lucid and nontechnical style, it has created more of a translation problem than any of his other works because he is more concerned with the form of the phenomenon he is studying than usual. Because so many jokes depend on the play of language and create their impact as a result of a self-conscious use of words, it is difficult to translate the jokes Freud cites as examples without losing the very language play that made them jokes in the first place. Thus, much of what drew Freud’s attention to the examples he uses may be lost on the English-language reader. As a result, translators and commentators have frequently resorted to English equivalents of the jokes Freud cites. This problem of translation, which makes many of Freud’s examples seem ill-suited to their purpose, may account for this work’s relative lack of impact, in spite of the fact that it is perhaps the most ambitious study Freud ever attempted on issues that involve a psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics.

Critical Context

Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious is not one of Freud’s most famous or influential books. It is considered a minor contribution compared to the epoch-making The Interpretation of Dreams, although it appeared shortly after the famous dream book and makes use of many of the same discoveries. Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s biographers, says that Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious is perhaps the least known of Freud’s works. Freud claimed, however, that his study of jokes was the first example of the application of psychoanalytic thinking to the issues of aesthetics, and several critics, including Ernst Kris in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952), have argued that it is the model for anyone who wishes to focus on artistic creation along Freudian lines.

In spite of the scope of this study, it has not carried the impact of such less ambitious but seemingly more suggestive studies as “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” and “The ’Uncanny.’” Even the relatively esoteric “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words” has received more consideration, at least by structuralist critics, than Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious.

Those critics and psychoanalysts who have made the most of Freud’s joke theories, although with varying degrees of success, are the famous art critic and historian E.H. Gombrich, the psychoanalyst Silvano Arieti, and the literary critic Norman Holland. Gombrich, in a brief essay in 1966, suggested that the joke book provided the basis of a theory of artistic form applicable to modern art, particularly in its focus on form rather than content. Arieti, in a discussion of creativity in 1976, used Freud’s study of jokes as an important element of his theories about art. Norman Holland, the most influential of the new Freudian literary critics, based his theory of literature as transformation on Freud’s study of jokes.

These studies, however, are minimal in comparison to the many studies which have derived from Freud’s other works. In addition, none of them has been completely successful in adapting Freud’s theories of wit to a theory about the nature of the artist’s creativity or the nature of the reader’s response. Too often, attempted explanations of such basic aesthetic processes have the same effect as the attempt to explain a joke; they never quite seem to match in sophistication the sensed complexity of the experience.

Perhaps the most profitable area in which Freud’s theories of jokes may yet make a contribution is in the linguistic study of figurative language. It has been pointed out by more than one theorist that the dual process of condensation and displacement which Freud finds characteristic of the structure of jokes corresponds to the means by which human beings construct meaning or respond to meaning in any area of symbolic language—the principles of substitution and combination, which are equivalent, respectively, to the figurative tropes of metonymy (displacement) and metaphor (condensation). In this area, the underlying assumption of Freud’s book—that the study of such obvious matters as jokes may stimulate revelations in other areas of human understanding—may yet bear unsuspected fruit.

Bibliography

Arieti, Silvano. Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, 1976.

Brenner, Charles. Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 1955.

Gombrich, E.H. “Freud’s Aesthetics,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1983. Edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips.

Holland, Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response, 1968.

Kris, Ernst. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 1952.

Lucas, F.L. Literature and Psychology, 1951.

Spector, Jack J. The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art, 1972.