The joke and its relationship to the unconscious

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Title page of the original edition of Sigmund Freud's "The joke and its relationship to the unconscious", Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna

The joke and its relation to the unconscious is the title of a study in which the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud examined the functionality and meaning of the joke in 1905. Freud presents earlier studies in order to then combine specific features of the joke with his theory of psychodynamics using concrete examples . The study is considered a key work in psychoanalysis and joke research.

content

In an essay from 1927, Freud summarized the central message of his analysis of jokes as follows:

“In my work on jokes and their relationship to the unconscious, I actually only dealt with humor from an economic point of view. It was important to me to find the source of the pleasure in humor, and I mean, I have shown that the humorous pleasure gain comes from the saved emotional effort. "

- Sigmund Freud : Humor , Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 14, ISBN 978-3-10-022715-7 , pp. 383-89

Freud saw in jokes a technique of the unconscious to save conflicts and to gain pleasure (the "economic point of view"). The gain in pleasure is based on a brief relaxation of repressions . By showing solidarity with like-minded people, the joke works against authorities, against the meaning or against those who think differently. The validity of Freud's reasoning depends heavily on his model of the psyche.

construction

introduction

In the introduction, Freud describes the approaches that already exist for a psychological or philosophical analysis of the joke, in particular works by Jean Paul and Theodor Lipps . These approaches, however, are scattered links, Freud sums up, which he would like to see "organically combined". In doing so, however, he will be referring to the same examples that his predecessors worked with.

Analytical part: technique and tendency of the joke

In this chapter Freud examines the technique of joke and the tendencies of joke. In doing so, he dispenses with psychoanalytical terminology, he "stages his text as a process of knowledge into which he lures the reader into".

Central technical aspects are the compression (for example in the combination of words when "familial" and "millionaire" are drawn together to "family"), the use of identical (word) material and the double meaning in puns. The "joke work", according to Freud, makes use of "a deviation from normal thinking, displacement and absurdity." These techniques correspond to the mechanisms of dream work described by Freud: The psyche also makes shifts in dreams, for example by representing a wish by its opposite.

In a further section Freud examines where the joke is directed. He differentiates between lust and aggression as the main tendencies. Freud describes the role of the joke in relation to these intentions as follows:

"It enables the satisfaction of an impulse (a lustful and hostile one) against an obstacle standing in the way, it bypasses this obstacle and thus draws pleasure from a source of pleasure that has become inaccessible due to the obstacle."

- Sigmund Freud : The joke and its relationship to the unconscious , Leipzig and Vienna, Franz Deuticke, 1905, p. 83.

The concrete obstacle could be an inhibition to act out sexual or aggressive urges. The joke briefly removes this inhibition and therefore has a pleasurable or funny effect. It is unclear to Freud what proportion of its power the joke draws from its tendency or its technique.

Synthetic part

Here Freud examines the pleasure mechanism and the psychogenesis of the joke as well as the motives of the joke and the joke as a social process. Freud explains that the joke derives its pleasure from the fact that an inhibition no longer has to be maintained. From this, Freud derives an explanation for why the narrator cannot laugh at his own joke: For the joke work, he has to use the psychological energy that is gained by the loss of inhibition. It is also crucial that the joke requires a distraction of attention: A joke in which the punch line can be guessed through correct attention control cannot develop any effect.

Theoretical part

In the final chapter, Freud shows the relationship between jokes and dreams and the unconscious. Freud makes the following assumption:

"A preconscious thought is left for a moment to be unconsciously processed, and its result is immediately grasped by conscious perception."

- Sigmund Freud : The joke and its relationship to the unconscious , Leipzig and Vienna, Franz Deuticke, 1905, p. 141.

The individual can return to the child's psychological state in which the constraints of reality were less. For Freud, proof of this is the fact that children do not do joke work.

In conclusion, Freud analyzes the comedy and humor more generally. He concludes with a summary of his study:

“We are now at the end of our task after we have reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to an analogous formula as for comic pleasure and jokes. The pleasure of joking seemed to us to emerge from saved inhibition effort, that of comedy from saved imagination (cast) and that of humor from saved emotional effort. In all three modes of operation of our mental apparatus, pleasure comes from a saving; All three agree that they represent methods for regaining a pleasure from mental activity which is actually only lost through the development of this activity. Because the euphoria that we strive to achieve on these paths is nothing more than the mood of a lifetime in which we used to do our psychological work with little effort, the mood of our childhood, in which we did not know the comic Were not capable of jokes and did not need the humor to make us feel happy in life. "

- Sigmund Freud : The joke and its relationship to the unconscious , Leipzig and Vienna, Franz Deuticke, 1905, p. 204f.

Argumentative structure

The structure of the book does not correspond to the argumentative logic, as Carl Pietcker has worked out. Freud viewed the joke in the following ways:

  • an economic, d. H. related to the distribution of psychic energy: In a joke, an expended psychic energy (e.g. for an inhibition, an idea) is released or "laughed at".
  • a topical, d. H. related to the location of the processes in the psychic apparatus - they take place consciously, unconsciously or preconsciously: The source of the joke lies in the unconscious (hence the title), where the techniques of condensation, displacement and the connection of opposites play a role.
  • a dynamic, d. H. related to the question of which psychic forces act against each other: In jokes, these are the demands of external reality, which, for example, create inhibitions, as well as sexual or aggressive desires that urge pleasure.
  • a genetic; d. H. How the joke got its meaning in the development of an individual: For Freud the joke represents a return to childhood, in which a pleasure could be experienced which is prevented by psychological techniques.
  • a communicative or social; d. H. In which situations the joke is used: Jokes can be used as a means of gaining sympathy, but also as a means of power.
  • a production and reception aesthetic; d. H. In relation to the question of what happens to the producer of a joke and his audience: The audience's laughter assures the narrator that the joke work will not leave them out of the community, but rather go through other similar processes.

Empirical review

In an essay from 1971, George W. Kelling derived four theses from Freud's work, which he verified empirically. He had the test subjects rate cartoons.

  1. If cartoons contain sexual, aggressive or morbid content, they will be perceived as more fun.
  2. If the main actors in cartoons are children, animals or people depicted as primitive, they are perceived as more fun than cartoons with adults who are close to the norm.
  3. The shorter the text parts of cartoons, the funnier they are perceived to be.
  4. The greater the differences in the assessment of a cartoon, the less funny it appears.

With the exception of the fourth hypothesis, the data supported the validity of these claims. So it seems possible to derive predictions from Freud's theory which can be substantiated. This does not confirm Freud's theory, in particular the assumptions relating to the psychological apparatus cannot be empirically proven. However, it should be obvious to justify the first thesis in Freud's argument that "the effort to be expended on displacement is the greatest".

Annie Hall

In his 1977 film Der Stadtneurotiker (OT: Annie Hall ), Woody Allen refers to Freud's writing several times. The main character tells several jokes in the film with explicit reference to Freud; Psychoanalysis itself, which was extremely popular in the USA in the 1970s, is also mentioned and ironically commented on in the film.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sigmund Freud: The joke and its relationship to the unconscious, Leipzig and Vienna, Franz Deuticke, 1905.
  2. ↑ Freud 1905, p. 6.
  3. ↑ Carl Pietcker: Sigmund Freud: The joke and its relationship to the unconscious , in: Wolfgang Mauser and Joachim Pfeifer (eds.): Lachen . Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2008. P. 19. ISBN 3-8260-3319-1
  4. ↑ Freud 1905, p. 29f.
  5. ↑ Freud 1905, p. 46.
  6. ↑ Freud 1905, p. 84.
  7. ↑ Freud 1905, p. 126ff.
  8. ↑ Carl Pietcker: Sigmund Freud: The joke and its relationship to the unconscious , in: Wolfgang Mauser and Joachim Pfeifer (eds.): Lachen . Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2008. pp. 19–28. ISBN 3-8260-3319-1
  9. ↑ George W. Kelling: An Empirical Investigation of Freud's Theory of Jokes , in: Psychoanalytic Review; Autumn 1971; 58/3; ProQuest p. 473
  10. ↑ Cf. Arnold Langenmeyer: Humor and his unconscious roots , in: Leidfaden: Volume 2, Issue 4, pp. 22-25. doi : 10.13109 / suffering. 2013.2.4.22
  11. ↑ Pietcker , ibid., P. 21.
  12. ↑ Langenmeyer , ibid., P. 25.

Primary text