Brill's paper on Mechanisms of Wit and Humor calls attention to the fact that there has been comparatively little written about the subject since Freud's publication Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious in 1905.

It is the author's custom to request of his patients the best joke or witty story that they have ever heard. After citing several such examples he shows how such anecdotes reveal important information to the analyst regarding the patient's personality with reference to conscious and unconscious trends. This is explicable on the supposition, Brill later explains, that the patient is induced to identify himself with the hero of the jest, on the basis of the well-known mechanism which Freud describes in his article on humor, that the ego identifies itself with its superego, and views with a kind of parental indulgence, its own short-comings. The mechanism is most clearly illustrated