Wit and its relation to the unconsciousFreud, Sigmund
Science
Wit and its relation to the unconscious
Freud, Sigmund
Subconsciousness; Wit and humor -- Psychological aspects
“_The Catholic priest_ is more like a clerk who is employed in a big
business; the church, the big house at the head of which is the Pope,
gives him a definite salary. He works lazily like one who is not working
on his own account, he has many colleagues, and so easily remains
unnoticed in the big business enterprise. He is concerned only in the
credit of the house and still more in its preservation, since he would
be deprived of his means of sustenance in case it went bankrupt. _The
Protestant clergyman_, on the other hand, is his own boss, and carries
on the religious businesses on his own account. He has no wholesale
trade like his Catholic brother-tradesman, but deals merely at retail;
and since he himself must understand it, he cannot be lazy. He must
praise his _articles of faith_ to the people and must disparage the
articles of his competitors. Like a true small trader he stands in his
retail store, full of envy of the industry of all large houses,
particularly the large house in Rome which has so many thousand
bookkeepers and packers on its payroll, and which owns factories in all
four corners of the world.”
In the face of this, as in many other examples, we can no longer dispute
the fact that a comparison may in itself be witty, and that the witty
impression need not necessarily depend on one of the known techniques of
wit. But we are entirely in the dark as to what determines the witty
character of the comparison, since it certainly does not cling to the
similarity as a form of expression of the thought, or to the operation
of the comparison. We can do nothing but include comparison with the
different forms of “indirect representation” which are at the disposal
of the technique of wit, and the problem, which confronted us more
distinctly in the mechanism of comparison than in the means of wit
hitherto treated, must remain unsolved. There must surely be a special
reason why the decision whether something is a witticism or not presents
more difficulties in cases of comparison than in other forms of
expression.
This gap in our understanding, however, offers no ground for complaint
that our first investigation has been unsuccessful. Considering the
intimate connection which we had to be prepared to ascribe to the
different types of wit, it would have been imprudent to expect that we
could fully explain this aspect of the problem before we had cast a
glance over the others. We shall have to take up this problem at another
place.
_Review of the Techniques of Wit_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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