Sigmund Freud - The joke and its relation to the unconscious

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE NEW PENGUIN FREUD
GENERAL EDITOR: ADAM PHILLIPS

THE JOKE AND ITS RELATION
TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitlers invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freuds life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

Until her retirement, JOYCE CRICK was for many years Senior Lecturer in German at University College London, and is now Honorary Special Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham. In the field of Germanistics she has written on Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Christa Wolf, Gnter Grass and Bertolt Brecht; in the field of Comparative Literature she collaborated on editing the German material for Princeton University Presss edition of Coleridges Notebooks, volumes III and IV, edited his translation of Schillers Wallenstein dramas and has written on Kafka in translation and on the German reception of Virginia Woolf. Her previous translations include selected texts for Cambridge University Presss volumes of German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism. In 2000 she was awarded the Schlegel Tieck Prize for her new translation of Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams (first edition) for Oxford University Presss Modern Classics series.

J OHN CAREY is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, a Fellow of the British Academy and chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. His books include critical studies of Milton, Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, Original Copy, aselection of his reviews and journalism, and a study of the elitism of early twentieth-century writers, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). He has also published three anthologies of reportage, science-writing and utopias and edited Thackerarys Vanity Fair for Penguin Classics. Pure Pleasure, his choice of the fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, appeared in 2000.

ADAM PHILLIPS was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwins Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdinis Box.

SIGMUND FREUD

The Joke and Its Relation
to the Unconscious

Translated by JOYCE CRICK
with an Introduction by JOHN CAREY

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First published as Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewuten
by Deuticke (Leipzig and Vienna) 1905

English translation published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2002
This edition published 2003

7 9 10 8 6

Sigmund Freuds German text collected in Gesammelte Werke (194052)
copyright Imago Publishing Co., Ltd, London, 1940

Translation and editorial matter copyright Joyce Crick, 2002
Introduction copyright John Carey, 2002

All rights reserved

Extracts from The Robbers & Wallenstein by Friedrich Schiller, translated by
F. J. Lamport (Penguin Classics, 1979), reproduced by permission of Penguin Books.

Translation copyright F. J. Lamport, 1979.

Extract from Back to Freuds Texts by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, translated by Philip Slotkin
(Yale University Press, 1996), reproduced by permission of Sigmund Freud Copyrights.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Freud, Sigmund, 18561939.

[Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. English]

The joke and its relation to the unconscious / Sigmund Freud; translated by Joyce Crick;
with an introduction by John Carey,

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-64479-9

1. Wit and humorPsychological aspects. 2. Subconsciousness. I. Title.

PN6149.P5F6813 2003

155.232dc21 2003043314

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Freuds book about jokes is even more original than his book about dreams. Many previous writers had suggested that dreams give us access to depths of our nature from which we are debarred in waking life. He is often credited with discovering the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). But the existence of the unconscious had been acknowledged long before, as Lancelot Law Whytes The Unconscious Before Freud (1962) has shown. By contrast the relationship Freud posits between jokes, dreams and the unconscious in the present work was quite new. Previous writers on humour, several of whom he cites, had never suspected anything of the kind. But for Freud the connection was vital. His theory of jokes grew out of his theory of dreams, because he believed that dreams use jokes as part of their disguise.

Dreams, according to Freud, express unconscious wishes. These usually relate to infantile sexuality (as, for example, the wish to copulate with ones mother, which Freud thought virtually universal among male children). However, dreams cannot express these wishes directly, because they are opposed by the part of our psychical apparatus that Freud calls the censorship (