Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious

Sigmund Freud noticed that humor, like dreams, can be related to unconscious content. In the 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (German: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten), as well as in the 1928 journal article Humor, Freud distinguished contentious jokes from non-contentious or silly humor. In fact, he sorted humor into three categories that could be translated as: joke, comic, and mimetic.

In Freud's view, jokes (the verbal and interpersonal form of humor) happened when the conscious allowed the expression of thoughts that society usually suppressed or forbade. The superego allowed the ego to generate humor. A benevolent superego allowed a light and comforting type of humor, while a harsh superego created a biting and sarcastic type of humor. A very harsh superego suppressed humor altogether.Freud’s humor theory, like most of his ideas, was based on a dynamic among id, ego, and super-ego. The commanding superego would impede the ego from seeking pleasure for the id, or to momentarily adapt itself to the demands of reality, a mature coping method. Moreover, Freud (1960) followed Herbert Spencer's ideas of energy being conserved, bottled up, and then released like so much steam venting to avoid an explosion. Freud was imagining psychic or emotional energy, and this idea is now thought of as the relief theory of laughter.

Later, Freud re-turned his attention to humor noting that not everyone is capable of formulating humor.

If jokes let out forbidden thoughts and feelings that the conscious mind usually suppresses in deference to society, there was an interaction between unconscious drives and conscious thoughts.

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