One reaches some solution of humoristic displacement if one examines it in the light of a defense process. The defense processes are the psychic correlates of the flight reflex and follow the task of guarding against the origin of pain from inner sources; in fulfilling this task they serve the psychic function as an automatic adjustment, which finally proves harmful and therefore must be subjected to the control of the conscious thinking. A definite form of this defense, the failure of repression, I have demonstrated as the effective mechanism in the origin of the psychoneuroses. Humor can now be conceived as the loftiest variant of this defense activity. It disdains to withdraw from conscious attention the ideas which are connected with the painful affect, as repression does, and thus it overcomes the defense automatism. It brings this about by finding the means to withdraw the energy resulting from the liberation of pain which is held in readiness and through discharge changes the same into pleasure. It is even credible that it is again the connection with the infantile that puts at humor’s disposal the means for this function. Only in childhood did we experience intensively painful affects over which to-day as grown-ups we would laugh; just as a humorist laughs over his present painful affects. The elevation of his ego, of which humoristic displacement gives evidence,—the translation of which would read: I am too big to have these causes affect me painfully—he could find in the comparison of his present ego with his infantile ego. This conception is to some extent confirmed by the rôle which falls to the infantile in the neurotic processes of repression. _The Relation of Humor to Wit and Comic_ On the whole humor is closer to the comic than wit. Like the former its psychic localization is in the foreconscious, whereas wit, as we had to assume, is formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the foreconscious. On the other hand, humor has no share in the peculiar nature in which wit and the comic meet, a peculiarity which perhaps we have not hitherto emphasized strongly enough. It is a condition for the origin of the comic that we be induced to apply—either _simultaneously_ or in rapid succession—to the same thought function two different modes of ideas, between which the “comparison” then takes place and thus forms the comic difference. Such differences originate between the expenditure of the stranger and one’s own, between the usual expenditure and the emergency expenditure, between an anticipated expenditure and one which has already occurred.[84]