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The title of this book contains a play on words (préanalytique/pré analytique—the preanalytic/the analytic field) and thus signals Kohn's interest in words as plastic material, an interest that is common in contemporary French psychoanalytic writings. Yet, while the book appears to be directed to readers interested in the interface between psychoanalysis and linguistics, it will be more satisfying to readers who are curious about Freud's cultural and intellectual history.
The author's central argument takes off from the following premise: "For Freud, who was completely a part of the German language, … Yiddish appears as something repressed which he no longer speaks even if he understands it" (p. 11, translations are my own). Before entering into the two main sections of the book—a commentary on various categories of Yiddish jokes followed by one on Freud's earliest writings—the author briefly traces the history and "prehistory" of Yiddish. He then announces that he will not take as his object the presence of Yiddish in Freud's work, but rather "this linguistic structure which he will, unbeknownst to him, put to work in his preanalytic works" (p. 12). The phrase "unbeknownst to him" reveals that this book will be another work attempting to look at the influence of Freud's blind spots on his writings.
The first section of the book proceeds, in a rambling way, to comment on a large number of Yiddish jokes, or Witz. Kohn refers only intermittently to the development of his hypothesis that there is something specific about Yiddish, a language related to the mainstream yet alienated from it, which provided a structure for Freud's thought. This part of the book is chiefly a catalogue of Witz organized around such themes as "Jews and Goyim," "Disbelievers," "Matchmakers," and so on.
Kohn refers at times to Freud's book on jokes, but his intention of writing a Beyond the Relation of Jokes to the Unconscious is not fulfilled. Freud chose to develop a theory of and from j