Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is divided into three sections: analytic, synthetic, and theoretical. In this work Freud further develops his principal discoveries on mental activity elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a text already containing a reference to wit in the structure of dreams. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUSįreud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) at nearly the same time as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), but here pleasure is approached from the angle of wit and its mechanisms and motives. Brill, Freud's chosen translator and former Chief of the Clinic of Psychiatry, Columbia University. It is presented here in an excellent English translation by A. Published a few years after Freud's breakthrough work, The Interpretation of Dreams, the present volume is not only an acutely perceptive psychological study, its lighthearted tone and abundant store of jokes and witticism make it one of the most accessible and enjoyable of Freud's works. With characteristic insight and intelligence he shows that wit, although it belongs to aesthetics, is subject to the same laws, shares the same mechanism and serves the same tendencies as neuroses, dreams and psychopathological acts. In Freud's hands, however, the study of wit became another avenue of investigation into the psyche. Until the publication of this important study, the literature on which was insubstantial those investigations that existed tended to neglect wit in favor of the larger, more general area of the comic. First analyzing the techniques and tendencies of wit, the great analyst probes the origins of wit in the 'pleasure mechanism.' He then discusses the motives of wit, wit as a social process, the relation of wit to dreams and the unconscious, and wit and the various forms of the comic. Renowned as the father of psychoanalysis, Freud was uniquely qualified to write this fascinating exploration of the nature of wit - including jokes and joking - and its role and function as a manifestation and vehicle of unconscious impulses.

Wit and its relation to the unconscious