it is successfully grasped in a series of cases, and then we always laugh about the “childish stupidity.” In fact every exposure of such an unconscious fact affects us in a “comical” manner.[59] It is easier to comprehend the character of these unconscious mental processes in the utterances of patients suffering from various psychic disturbances. It is very probable that, following the assumption of old Griesinger, we would be in a position to understand the deliria of the insane and to turn them to good account as valuable information, if we would not make the demands of conscious thinking upon them, but instead treat them as we do dreams by means of our art of interpretation.[60] In the dream, too, we were able to show the “return of psychic life to the embryonal state.”[61] In discussing the processes of condensation we have entered so deeply into the signification of the analogy between wit and dreams that we can here be brief. As we know that displacements in dream-work point to the influence of the censor of conscious thought, we will consequently be inclined to assume that an inhibiting force also plays a part in the formation of wit when we find the process of displacement among the techniques of wit. We also know that this is commonly the case; the endeavor of wit to revive the old pleasure in nonsense or the old pleasure in word-play meets with resistance in every normal state, a resistance which is exerted by the protest of critical reason, and which must be overcome in each individual case. But a radical distinction between wit and dreams is shown in the manner in which the wit-work solves this difficulty. In the dream-work the solution of this task is brought about regularly through displacements and through the choice of ideas which are remote enough from the objectionable ones to secure passage through the censor; the latter themselves are but offsprings of those whose psychic energy they have taken upon themselves through full transference. The displacements are therefore not lacking in any dream and are far more comprehensive; they not only comprise the deviations from the trend of thought but also all forms of indirect expression, the substitution for an important but offensive element of one seemingly indifferent and harmless to the censor which form very remote allusions to the first, they include substitution also occurring through symbols, comparisons, or trifles. It is not to be denied that parts of this indirect representation really originate in the foreconscious thoughts of the dream,—as, for example, symbolical representation and representation through comparisons—because otherwise the thought would not have reached the state of the foreconscious expression. Such indirect expressions and allusions, whose reference to the original thought is easily findable, are really permissible and customary means of expression even in our conscious thought. The dream-work, however,