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My study attempts to explore the path indicated by Victor Rosen1 and to offer further development in tracing the relationship between content and form in discourse. Responding to Ernst Kris’ lament that psychoanalysis had yet to address itself to a psychology of style and honestly recognizing the necessarily circumscribed limits of his own efforts in a vast interdisciplinary domain, Rosen defined style as “a progressing synthesis of form and content in an individually typical manner according to the individual's sense of ‘appropriateness.’ Style is conceived as an expression of the organizing function of the ego “(pp. 287-288). To see this delineation within a grand perspective, I suggest that style might be considered ideally as content appropriately elaborated or extended by form and as such is a distinctive characteristic of human discourse, whether it be enacted clinically, oneirically, or aesthetically. We should be ever alert to the intricate relationship of content and form in discourse variously conducted at the lowest and highest levels of mental functioning. Pertinent to the oneiric context, there is Freud's contention that “The form of a dream or the form in which it is dreamt is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject-matter” (S. E. 4: 332).
However profitable the application of Freudian dream theory to literature has been, the dream theory itself does not account for all mental functioning. More particularly, Freud's theory of jokes must be used to supplement the dream theory as an approach to the understanding of literature; to do otherwise entails reductionism. Freud's distinction is relevant here:
Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of unpleasure, jokes for the attainment of pleasure; but all our mental activities converge in these two aims (S. E., 8: 180; italics mine).