Freud - Complete Works (308 page)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1747

   A theory which is novel, which
lacks simplicity and which runs counter to our habits of thought,
can scarcely gain in clarity from a concise presentation. All I can
aim at in these remarks, therefore, is to draw attention to the
fuller treatment of the unconscious in my
Interpretation of
Dreams
and to the writings of Lipps, which seem to me of the
highest importance. I am aware that anyone who is under the spell
of a good academic philosophical education, or who takes his
opinions at long range from some so-called system of philosophy,
will be opposed to the assumption of an ‘unconscious
psychical’ in the sense in which Lipps and I use the term,
and will prefer to prove its impossibility on the basis of a
definition of the psychical. But definitions are a matter of
convention and can be altered. I have often found that people who
dispute the unconscious as being something absurd and impossible
have not formed their impressions from the sources from which I at
least was brought to the necessity of recognizing it. These
opponents of the unconscious had never witnessed the effect of a
post-hypnotic suggestion, and when I have told them examples from
my analyses with non-hypnotized neurotics they have been filled
with the greatest astonishment. They had never realized the idea
that the unconscious is something which we really do not know, but
which we are obliged by compelling inferences to supply; they had
understood it as being something capable of becoming conscious but
which was not being thought of at the moment, which did not occupy
‘the focal point of attention’. Nor had they ever tried
to convince themselves of the existence in their own minds of
unconscious thoughts like these by analysing one of their own
dreams; and when I attempted to do so with them they could only
greet their own associations with surprise and confusion. I have
also formed an impression that fundamental emotional resistances
stand in the way of accepting the ‘unconscious’, and
that these are based on the fact that no one wants to get to know
his unconscious and that the most convenient plan is to deny its
possibility altogether.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1748

   The dream-work, then - to which I
return after this digression - submits the thought-material, which
is brought forward in the optative mood, to a most strange
revision. First, it takes the step from the optative to the present
indicative; it replaces ‘Oh! if
only . . .’ by ‘It is’. The
‘It is’ is then given a hallucinatory representation;
and this I have called the ‘regression’ in the
dream-work - the path that leads from thoughts to perceptual
images, or, to use the terminology of the still unknown topography
of the mental apparatus (which is not to be taken anatomically),
from the region of thought-structures to that of sensory
perceptions. On this path, which is in the reverse direction to
that taken by the course of development of mental complications,
the dream-thoughts are given a pictorial character; and eventually
a plastic situation is arrived at which is the core of the manifest
‘dream-picture’. In order for it to be possible for the
dream-thoughts to be represented in sensory form, their expression
has to undergo far-reaching modifications. But while the thoughts
are being changed back into sensory images still further
alterations occur in them, some of which can be seen to be
necessary while others are surprising. We can understand that, as a
subsidiary result of regression, almost all the internal relations
between the thoughts which linked them together will be lost in the
manifest dream. The dream-work, as we might say, only undertakes to
represent the raw material of the ideas and not the logical
relations in which they stand to one another; or at all events it
reserves the liberty to disregard the latter. On the other hand,
there is another part of the dream-work which we cannot attribute
to regression, to the change back into sensory images; and it is
precisely this part which has an important bearing on our analogy
with the formation of jokes. In the course of the dream-work the
material of the dream-thoughts is subjected to a quite
extraordinary compression or
condensation
. A starting point
for it is provided by any common elements that may be present in
the dream-thoughts, whether by chance or from the nature of their
content. Since these are not as a rule sufficient for any
considerable condensation, new artificial and transient common
elements are created in the dream-work, and to this end there is
actually a preference for the use of words the sound of which
expresses different meanings. The newly-created common elements of
condensation enter the manifest content of the dream as
representatives of the dream-thoughts, so that an element in the
dream corresponds to a nodal point or junction in the
dream-thoughts, and, as compared with these latter, must quite
generally be described as ‘overdetermined’. The fact of
condensation is the piece of the dream-work which can be most
easily recognized; it is only necessary to compare the text of a
dream as it is noted down with the record of the dream-thoughts
arrived at by analysis in order to get a good impression of the
extensiveness of dream-condensation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1749

   It is less easy to convince
oneself of the second great modification of the dream-thoughts that
is brought about by the dream-work - the process that I have named
‘dream-
displacement
’. This is exhibited in the
fact that things that lie on the periphery of the dream-thoughts
and are of minor importance occupy a central position and appear
with great sensory intensity in the manifest dream, and
vice
versa
. This gives the dream the appearance of being displaced
in relation to the dream-thoughts, and this displacement is
precisely what brings it about that the dream confronts waking
mental life as something alien and incomprehensible. In order that
a displacement of this kind may occur, it must be possible for the
cathectic energy to pass over uninhibited from the important ideas
to the unimportant ones - which, in normal thought that is capable
of being conscious, can only give an impression of ‘faulty
reasoning’.

   Transformation with a view to the
possibility of representation, condensation and displacement are
the three major achievements that may be ascribed to the
dream-work. A fourth, which was perhaps too shortly considered in
The Interpretation of Dreams
, is not relevant for our
present purposes. If the ideas of a ‘topography of the mental
apparatus’ and of ‘regression’ are consistently
followed up (and only in that way could these working hypotheses
come to have any value), we must attempt to determine the stages of
regression at which the various transformations of the
dream-thoughts take place. This attempt has not yet been seriously
undertaken; but it can at least be stated with certainty that
displacement must take place in the thought-material while it is at
the stage of the unconscious processes, while condensation must
probably be pictured as a process stretching over the whole course
of events till the perceptual region is reached. But in general we
must be content to assume that all the forces which take part in
the formation of dreams operate simultaneously. Though one must, as
will be realized, exercise reserve in dealing with such problems,
and though there are fundamental doubts, which cannot be entered
into here, as to whether the question should be framed in this
manner, yet I should like to venture on the assertion that the
process of the dream-work preparatory to the dream must be located
in the region of the unconscious. Thus, speaking roughly, there
would in all be three stages to be distinguished in the formation
of a dream: first, the transplanting of the preconscious
day’s residues into the unconscious, in which the conditions
governing the state of sleep must play a part; then, the dream-work
proper in the unconscious; and thirdly, the regression of the
dream-material, thus revised, to perception, in which form the
dream becomes conscious.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1750

   The following forces may be
recognized as having a share in the formation of dreams: the wish
to sleep, the cathexis of energy that still remains in the
day’s residues after it has been lowered by the state of
sleep, the psychical energy of the dream-constructing unconscious
wish and the opposing force of the ‘censorship’, which
dominates daytime life and is not completely lifted during sleep.
The task of dream-formation is above all to overcome the inhibition
from the censorship; and it is precisely this task which is solved
by the displacements of psychical energy within the material of the
dream-thoughts.

   Let us now recall what it was
during our investigation of jokes that gave us occasion to think of
dreams. We found that the characteristics and effects of jokes are
linked with certain forms of expression or technical methods, among
which the most striking are condensation, displacement and indirect
representation. Processes, however, which lead to the same results
- condensation, displacement and indirect representation - have
become known to us as peculiarities of the dream-work. Does not
this agreement suggest the conclusion that joke-work and dream-work
must, at least in some essential respect, be identical? The
dream-work has, I think, been revealed to us as regards its most
important characteristics. Of the psychical processes in jokes the
part that is hidden from us is precisely the one that may be
compared to the dream-work - namely, what happens during the
formation of a joke in the first person. Shall we not yield to the
temptation to construct that process on the analogy of the
formation of a dream? A few of the characteristics of dreams are so
alien to jokes that the part of the dream-work corresponding to
those characteristics cannot be transferred to the formation of
jokes. There is no doubt that the regression of the train of
thought to perception is absent in jokes. But the other two stages
of dream-formation, the sinking of a preconscious thought into the
unconscious and its unconscious revision, if they could be supposed
to occur in joke-formation, would present the precise outcome that
we can observe in jokes. Let us decide, then, to adopt the
hypothesis that this is the way in which jokes are formed in the
first person:
a preconscious thought is given over for a moment
to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped
by conscious perception
.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1751

   Before we examine this hypothesis
in detail, we will consider an objection which might threaten our
premiss. We have started from the fact that the techniques of jokes
indicate the same processes that are known to us as peculiarities
of the dream-work. Now it is easy to argue against this that we
should not have described the techniques of jokes as condensation,
displacement, etc., and should not have arrived at such far
reaching conformities between the methods of representation in
jokes and dreams, if our previous knowledge of the dream-work had
not prejudiced our view of the technique of jokes; so that at
bottom we are only finding in jokes a confirmation of the
expectations with which we approached them from dreams. If this was
the basis of the conformity, there would be no certain guarantee of
its existence apart from our prejudice. Nor indeed have
condensation, displacement and indirect representation been taken
by any other author as explaining the forms of expression of jokes.
This would be a possible objection, but not on that account a just
one. It would be equally possible that it was indispensable for our
views to be sharpened by a knowledge of the dream-work before we
could recognize the real conformity. A decision will after all
depend only on whether a critical examination can prove on the
basis of individual examples that this view of the technique of
jokes is a forced one in whose favour other more plausible and
deeper-going views have been suppressed, or whether such an
examination is obliged to admit that the expectations derived from
dreams can really be confirmed in jokes. I am of the opinion that
we have nothing to fear from such criticism and that our procedure
of ‘reduction’ (
p. 1629
)
has shown us reliably in what forms of expression to look for the
techniques of jokes. And if we gave those techniques names which
already anticipated the discovery of the conformity between
joke-technique and dream-work, we had a perfect right to do so and
it was in fact nothing more than an easily justifiable
simplification.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1752

   There is another objection which
would not affect our case so seriously but which is also not so
open to a fundamental disproof. It might be said that, while it is
true that these techniques of joking which fit in so well with our
scheme deserve to be recognized, they are nevertheless not the only
possible techniques of joking nor the only ones used in practice.
It might be argued that under the influence of the model of the
dream-work we have only looked for techniques of joking which
fitted in with it, while others, overlooked by us, would have
proved that this conformity was not invariably present. I really
cannot venture to assert that I have succeeded in elucidating the
technique of every joke in circulation; and I must therefore leave
open the possibility that my enumeration of joke-techniques will
show some incompleteness. But I have not intentionally excluded
from discussion any kind of technique that was clear to me, and I
can declare that the commonest, most important and most
characteristic methods of joking have not escaped my attention.