The work The Jokes and its Relation to the Unconscious was published by Sigmund Freud in 1905, four years after Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The book, however, was not as successful as its predecessor. Only a few years later did it find a comfortable place as a publication.

Have you heard about this book? No? Now check out the analysis of this work and its relation to jokes, humor, and the unconscious for Freud!

About Freud's Book The Jokes

The book The Chistes and their Relation to the Unconscious Sigmund Freud analyzes such characteristics and tries to understand what the real reason for telling jokes is. chiste is based on six basic techniques:

• condensation - joining of two words or expressions to form an equivocation;
• displacement - The meaning of an expression is displaced in the discourse;
• double direction - an expression or word that has more than one meaning;
• use of the same material - use of words to generate new meaning;
• Pun or Joke by Similarity - where one expression refers to the other meaning;
• antinomic representation - when you affirm something and then deny it.

The Chistes and their Relation to the Unconscious

As the title says, the book deals with the psychoanalytic analysis of humor Using his characteristic methodical spirit, Freud analyzes the technique behind the jokes. From this analysis, he concludes that they have the same function and origin as neurotic psychic symptoms, dreams, and failure acts.

In other words, The joke is also a form of expression of the unconscious. Jokes, especially biased ones, would serve as a way to release certain inhibited thoughts, that is, thoughts that have been the object of repression.

In his book, Freud drew attention to the fact that the comic had not been the object of much study until then, neither in psychology nor in philosophy. Even today, more than a century later, the theme continues to be less explored than it might have been.

One of the aspects that would explain this high scientific interest would be that much of the pleasure involved in the joke is unconscious . both for the practitioner and the receiver.

Humor as a door to the unconscious

Understanding this unconscious process, which constitutes the joke, is completely dispensable for understanding the joke itself. This means that you don't need to understand the unconscious motivation of a joke to find it funny. Thus, explanations of the mechanism of comicality are not of much interest historically.

In a first moment, we see the author analyzing some critical concepts in order to understand why the joke is funny to us. In other words, what makes us think it's funny In this way, he analyzes styles of joke structure, such as those based on word fusion or word modification.

With this, he understood that one's intentions are important elements in determining which style or form of jokes that person will use.

Trending Jokes from the Book The Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Freud is also concerned with biased and innocent jokes. Freud points out, in the aforementioned book, that the innocent joke is almost always responsible for only moderate laughter For example, "toc toc toc" jokes, which do not contain a broader and deeper meaning.

While a tendentious joke is one that is capable of provoking an explosion of laughter This fact, empirically observable, would have been what demonstrated to the author the impossibility of leaving aside in his research the tendentious joke.

The author also says that, since both types of jokes have the same technique, it would make the tendentious joke irresistible. This would be because, due to its purpose, it could possess sources of pleasure that innocent jokes could not access.

When referring to biased jokes, it simply means that they have a specific tendency or purpose. While the fun of innocuous or innocent jokes lies in their technique, biased jokes derive as much from the technique as from the content expressed by it. Their ultimate purpose is to satisfaction of unconscious desires .

Understanding Freudian Jokes and Humor

For Freud, biased jokes would be a way to evade our inhibitions to express our drives or our unconscious mental contents. In this sense, they are used for us to express everything that could not become conscious by other means. It is like the function of the dream.

Sexual issues, for example, that are not usually dealt with openly with people who are not close to them, can be brought up through jokes.

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Humor as a Strategy for Recalcitrance

As said before, when telling a joke, especially if it is biased, one expresses repressed thoughts. In this case, one can perceive humor as a mechanism to deal with the recalque .

For example, jokes with "socially forbidden" content, the so-called " black humor ".

An example

Freud gives in his book a very interesting example, which I believe can help everyone to understand this notion.

The author tells the story of a king who was walking through the streets of his domain, and while he was walking he came across a villager who looked very much like him, so much so that the king stopped to talk to the subject. The king then asked him "has your mother ever been to court?", to which the villager replied "no, sir, but my father has".

In this case, we have a joke whose source of pleasure lies both in the technique and in the content it expresses. Let us first think about the content. The king, occupying the highest position of power, mocks a villager by sexual innuendo. The villager, who must serve and respect his king, could not offend him or his mother directly.

Through a joke, however, he manages to express his desire for answers that would otherwise be barred before reaching his conscious.

Technique

As for the technique, Freud believes that the more veiled the content of the joke is, the more elaborate it is, and therefore, the more comic it is. Continuing with our example, we can demonstrate the level of elaboration of this joke by analyzing the thought behind the joke. If we eliminate the technique and look only at the content, the villager's response would be different.

He would say "no, sir, your father did not have sex with my mother, but my father may have had sex with yours." In addition to a way of insulting the king's mother (according to prevailing sexual norms), the phrase further indicates that if either of the two is the result of an extramarital relationship, and is characterized as an illegitimate child, that someone is the king.

Conclusion: the jokes in Freud's psychoanalysis

We can see, therefore, that the joke is composed of technique and content, and its humor derives from both. Still, Freud could not define the proportion between the importance of these elements. Thus, we conclude that for Freud, jokes are a form of expression of unconscious contents. We can say that Freudian theory highlights four forms of visible expression of contentsunconscious:

• the jokes as explained in this article;
• the dreams : they are the roads that lead to the desires and fears of the unconscious;
• the flawed acts : through "involuntary" exchanges of words or gestures.
• the symptoms It is also a way in which the mind elaborates a repressed pain into a visible manifestation.

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