A Shift in Psychical Accent: Freud's “Witz” a Century Later

It is astonishing to me that Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious—the “Witz”—is only 100 years old. It strikes me as an older document, certainly not typical of the 20th-century zeitgeist. Freud's languid pace, concealing a fractal complexity at every turn, seems to reflect a more sophisticated civilization than our own. So what can we say now, in an era dominated by cultural forms Freud feared and even detested, about this odd little book?t

It is difficult to describe the very different angle from which Freud saw humour. We tend to think of it as a natural and salubrious expression of human energies, and we attribute this cheerful view to Freud himself—for example, the idea of a healthy liberation of unconscious forces, a sort of psychic leeching. The therapeutic value of humour and laughter is, of course (in great part thanks to Freud), now very well appreciated. But to see this as the essence of his reflections on the comic is to illustrate the radical distance now dividing contemporary thought, including psychoanalytic thought, from psychoanalysis as Freud originally conceived it.1

Freud doesn't think in terms of liberation and revolution, but of economical balance and parsimony, making the best of an inherently corrupt situation. He sees biological evolution and the history of the human organism, or psyche-soma, as a series of painful dislocations and compromises