Have processes similar to those here described as the technique of wit already been noted in another sphere of our psychic life? To be sure, in one apparently remote sphere. In 1900 I published a book which, as indicated by its title (_The Interpretation of Dreams_[20]), makes the attempt to explain the riddle of the dream and to trace the dream to normal psychic operations. I had occasion to contrast there the manifest and often peculiar dream-content with the latent but altogether real thoughts of the dream from which it originated, and I took up the investigation of the processes which make the dream from the latent dream-thought. I also investigated the psychological forces which participated in this transposition. The sum of the transforming processes I designated as the dream-work and, as a part of this dream-work, I described the process of condensation. This process has a striking similarity to the technique of wit and, like the latter, it leads to abbreviations and brings about substitutive formations of like character. From recollections of his own dreams the reader will be familiar with the compositions of persons and objects that appear in them; indeed, the dream makes similar compositions of words which can then be reduced by analysis (e.g., Autodidasker—Autodidakt and Lasker[21]). On other occasions and even much more frequently, the condensation work of the dream produces no compositions, but pictures which closely resemble an object or person up to a certain addition or variation which comes from another source, like the modifications in the witticisms of Mr. N. We cannot doubt that in this case, as in the other, we deal with a similar psychic process which is recognizable by identical results. Such a far-reaching analogy between wit-technique and dream-work will surely arouse our interest in the former and stimulate our expectation of finding some explanation of wit from a comparison with the dream. We forbear, however, to enter upon this work by bearing in mind that we have investigated the technique of wit in only a very small number of witty jests, so that we cannot be certain that the analogy, the workings of which we wish to explore, will hold good. Hence we turn away from the comparison with the dream and again take up the technique of wit, leaving, however, at this place of our investigation a visible thread, as it were, which later we shall take up again. _Wit Formed by Word-division_