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The fragments of case material herewith presented are thought of as illustrative of the principles set forth in Freud's essay on Humor,1 and are submitted with the purpose of testing the value of such clinical data as a means of studying Humor genetically. As the genetic study of the sense of guilt has given us much of our knowledge of the structure and function of the Superego, so a clinical study of Humor in statu nascendi may ultimately extend further our knowledge of the Superego and its relation to the Ego.
The earliest psychoanalytic treatment of Humor occurs in the closing pages of Freud's “Wit and the Unconscious,”2 where he stressed the economic aspect, pointing out that humor is a saving of affect as wit is of inhibition. Not until twenty years later came the essay on Humor, which has apparently inspired others—notably3 Reik, Hitschmann, Winterstein, Bergler, Oberndorf, and Anna Freud with her reference to childish prototypes of humor. The subject of humor is finally beginning to receive from psychoanalysts the attention it needs in a none-too-happy world.
Freud showed that when an individual treats a situation humorously he treats the person involved, whether it be himself or another, as a child. If he is himself the subject of the humorous attitude he reduces his own ego to the childish level. There is a displacement of cathexis from ego to superego—the person lives more as superego than as ego—when he is humorous. To this greatly expanded superego the ego appears as infinitesimally small, its dangers and sufferings consequently laughably insignificant, as if the all-powerful father said to the trembling child, “See, here is the world that looked so dangerous—a child's play, only fit to be made a jest of.” (” Humor,” Int. J. Psycho-Anal., Vol. IX, p. 6.)