Humor and the psychoanalyst
In: Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis III (1988), 2, 187-198.
I
Perhaps the best approach to understanding humor is to pay attention first to humor as a procedure and a technique. The procedure of humor is as follows. First an idea is posited. Hereby an emotional tension is evoked. Unexpectedly a second idea is then posited, which stands in a contradictory relationship to the first one, with the result that the two ideas collide. This collision effects an emotional discharge in the hearer, which expresses itself in laughter.
The awareness of contradiction which humor evokes at a conscious level is the expression of contradictions at a preconscious or unconscious level. Human existence is characterized by the interplay of contradictions. As instances of contradiction I mention in a rather arbitrary sequence the following: finite-infinite, great-small, exalted-futile, wanting to live- having to die, good-evil, appearance- reality, truth-lie, egocentric-eccentric, symbol-reality, I am my body – I have (a relationship to) my body, serious – not serious, fate-guilt, order-chaos, Eros-Thanatos, law-transgression, ‘überlegen sein’ – subjected, summum jus – summa injuria. In each of the examples of humor and ‘Witz’, which are discussed in this article, the reader can search out which contradictions are exploited (1).
We must now make an important distinction regarding the ways in which people handle the contradictions to which they are subjected. Either one can repress the contradiction or one can experience the contradiction consciously. A major aspect of humor consists precisely in the acceptance of a contradiction that previously existed unconsciously.
I give a few examples. Take the old jest ‘an egotist is someone who is not concerned about me.’ The person who invented this jest must have accepted the conflict of the contradiction of importance and insignificance and the conflict between one’s own interests and those of others. When Oscar Wilde joked ‘I can resist everything except temptation’, he had brought into his conscious the painful contradictions of strength and weakness, delusion and reality, freedom and bondage, loss and longing, law and transgression. The contradictions of truth and lie and of appearance and reality form a favorite area of exploitation by ‘Witze’ and humor. For instance, a Dominican monk goes to his abbot to ask whether he may smoke while praying and the answer is ‘no’; thereupon a Jesuit goes to his prior to ask whether he may pray while smoking and the answer is in the positive. Another example is the anecdote of two Jews meeting each other in the train. One asks: ‘Where are you going?’ The other answers: ‘To Krakau’, whereupon the first one says: ‘How big a liar you are. When you say Krakau you want me to believe you go to Lemberg. Now by chance I know that you go to Krakau indeed. So why do you lie to me?’
There are several levels on which we can enjoy these anecdotes. There is the level of social intercourse: what we say is susceptible of diverse interpretations, because in what we reveal we also conceal a lot. A second level consists in the conflict of interest between groups in society. Politics is often characterized by lying while one also tells the truth. One game of politicians is to make us believe that it is the other one who lies. A deeper level still is that of the fundamental uncertainty about life, death, truth, the meaning of existence, the existence of God, and furthermore concerning questions like these: what is good and how can I do it; what are the grounds on which the validity of our cultural norms rest? We can not escape from uncertainty regarding the foundations of our words and acts.
The abovementioned anecdotes shock us in our presumed certainties and they reveal that nothing is certain. Acceptance of fundamental uncertainty causes loneliness, both as spate individuals and as groups together, a loneliness which we can only partly endure. We must create certainties to live by. But our certainties tend to become oppressive. Humor is a royal gesture to unmask momentarily the presumption of our certainties. In this sense also it is true that the humorist has internalized the contradictions. The pleasure which humor gives us consists among other things in the awareness that we have the capacity to make a contradiction conscious which previously was unconscious. To do so is to be victorious over the world. It lends a feeling of power: I am not at the mercy of the world outside me, which would overcome me, no! I see through the contradiction and therefore I have power over it.
I shall give a few examples to bring this idea home. One Jew says to the other: ‘I can see what you ate last night.’ ‘Oh yes?’ ‘Yes, you ate mess of pottage.’ ‘You are wrong’, the other replies, ‘that was the day before yesterday’. By taking the contradiction into his own mind he outdoes the other instead of becoming an object of ridicule. The famous Dutch entertainer Wim Kan once said: ‘the only thing that ever changed on this earth is that a couple of people walked on the moon.’ More effectively than a lengthy discourse these words make us conscious of the contradictions of power and impotence, grandeur and misery, kingdom and utopia. The same effect has Multatuli’s dictum: ‘No statement is wholly true, neither this one.’ By contrast take the example of the woman who says: ‘My husband is getting older. If ever something (fatal) befalls one of us, I am going to live in Paris.’ We laugh at this woman because she does not allow the contradiction to become conscious.
II
To gain a further understanding of the contradictions humor exploits, we must consider the relationship between the secondary and the primary process. The possibility to bring contradiction into our consciousness is dependent on the secondary process. By virtue of this process we can move away from our egocentricity. That is why – unlike an adult – a child does not have humor at his disposal. Humor is rightly called the ripe fruit of a painful process of growing up. Humor presupposes cultivation. It requires a considerable amount of reflection to make contradictions conscious. Yet humor has much to do with the child in us. With the full-blown powers of the secondary process we return to the primary process. Humor can be described as the pleasure of returning to the child which formerly was not yet there. Now the adult is again the child i.e. thanks to his adult stature he can experience the child in a way in which the child was unable at that time to experience himself. This was beautifully phrased by Kierkegaard (1846) when he said: ‘the humorist possesses the childlike quality, but is not possessed by it. He constantly prevents the childlike quality from expressing itself directly, but lets it only shimmer through an absolute culture’ (pag. 490). The child is much more at the mercy of the outside world than the adult is. For a child reality is often too overwhelming and his reflection too weak to bring the contradictions into consciousness itself.
How does the secondary process enable the grown-up person to handle the contradictions in such a way as to make them less painful? This is done by way of a mechanism, which we will call compartmentalization. The capacity to keep ideas in separate compartments in our mind is an important aspect of adulthood. In one compartment I know for instance that my life is uncertain and can end any day, in another compartment I don’t know this. If I would say to my friend: ‘till tomorrow, when we will dine together, at least if I shall not have met a fatal accident in the meantime’, then this would be a socially confusing way to mix separate compartments. To take another example: someone can easily be a famous and prestigious man in his specialized field of research and at the same time an emotional cripple of a terrorizing infant in his immediate surroundings. Only if the two compartments are mixed the man may become very comic.
We must now come to speak of language in the secondary process, for this is one of the mightiest means of compartmentalization. In the secondary process, words can reach a level of abstraction and precision whereby one meaning is rigorously separated from other meanings. In humor however, the secondary process meaning of a word collides with primary process meanings of the same word. With words in their abstract meaning the humorist build up a tension in us, he rouses expectations in us, he first holds u captive within the secondary process. Then unexpectedly we receive a blow from the other side, a blow from the other meaning, the primary meaning of the word. We are taken by surprise and for one moment thrown out of balance.
Many jokes are built on this principle of collision of primary and secondary process. For instance: Berlin (said a nineteenth century rabbi) is a city full of godliness for everyone who enters it as a pious man leaves this city as a godless person and thus leaves his godliness behind. The primary and the secondary processes differ in the relationship they have to reality. This difference is exploited by jokes. In the primary process a symbol and the thing it represents are not yet clearly separated. The confusion of symbol and reality can lead to laughter as lustful experience. A Jew e.g. tells his rabbi: ‘people think I am a rich man, but in fact I am ruined.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘My bank-books make this clear.’ ‘Then burn your bank-books.’ A similar anecdote is told in the Mid-West of America, where the farmers objected to daylight saving time because the extra hour in the evening would burn their crops too much.
Word-symbols function differently according to the layer of consciousness which they evoke. In the layer of consciousness in which we think and behave as members of a group, obedient to the rules and codes of the group, a word symbol functions quite differently compared to the way this same word functions in the layer in which vehement feelings are evoked by a concrete situation. Take e.g. the word-symbol ‘bitter’ in the following anecdote (for a correct understanding one must realize that ritual food laws of the Jews were very strict and that in Eastern Europe at that time in cases of doubt the rabbi decided). A poor Jew comes to the rabbi with a slaughtered chicken: ‘Rabbi, is this chicken kosher? It has no gall.’ The Jew heaves a deep sigh: ‘For sure it is bitter, rabbi! My promising son is sick, the doctor says he must have chicken-soup, I sold my pillow to buy the chicken, and now he would not be allowed to eat it! Tell me: is that not bitter?’ Softly the Rabbi decides: ‘If it is bitter, then the chicken is kosher.’ In this anecdote we notice the presence of several concepts I have tried to elucidate: contradiction (namely of rule versus existence), the collision of secondary and primary process and the fictional character of language.
Of this last concept I want to give just a few more examples. When a speaker remarked: ‘the problems around this issue are greatly complicated by its metablems’, he pointed to the fact that language has many possibilities of combination which we don’t exploit but could do so very well. We tend to look upon the arbitrary language codes as if they were things with a fixed character. Precisely by transgressing the codes we reveal their fictional character. Schleiermacher in his bon mot: ‘Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht was Leiden schafft’, makes game of this tendency to treat words as things. Another speaker said: ‘Life is enacted not only in its paradoxes but also in its parasanges’ (referring to Xenophon’s Anabasis). By playing on fictional sounds on the surface, he evokes a contradiction in the depths.
In various ways these examples illustrate that humor shifts- be it for a moment – the balance between secondary and primary process. The secondary process operating in the service of our adjustment to society, has the tendency to make our behavior stereotyped and rigid, a standardized product. The laws and rules of the group, the moral codes and the rigid patterns of language function as a strait-jacket, which makes us suitable citizens. In this sense (as Freud has often indicated) culture is a burden we must bear. This explains the lustful character of humor. Humor fees us momentarily from the dominance of the secondary process. The primary process has full rein, the separation between the compartments is abolished briefly and the tension discharges in the liberating laugh of humor.
We may distinguish two categories in which the regulation of existence through culture takes place. The one is the logical order of rationality, the other is the ethical or moral order. With regard to both these orders the play of humor exploits logical and moral absurdity respectively. The heavy burden of the moral order is played with in the following anecdote. A Jew in the army of the Czar who fought exceedingly bravely could choose between a military order and a hundred rouble. The Jewish soldier asked: ‘this order is worth how much?’ The officer answered: ‘That’s a senseless question, it costs one rouble at the most, but it is a matter of honor’, whereupon the soldier replied: ‘Yes, I get it, just give me then ninety nine rouble and the order.’ In one flashing moment the pretense of the moral order is annihilated, and the fictional and tenuous character of sacred values is revealed. Humor plunges right into the fundamental uncertainty, which we cover with our societal certainties. The Jew as outsider is pre-eminently suited to reveal the nothingness of our cultural codes.
There is a second factor, next to the liberation from the dominance of the secondary process, which explains the lustful character of humor. Humor satisfies the basic human need of new experience. This need of new experience is also called the need of creativity and is distinguished as a fourth basic need in addition to the three basic needs of security, power and intimacy, which psychoanalysts know too well in the context of oral, anal and phallic-genital phases. This fourth need can unfold only after the first three have come into their own. Humor satisfies this need through the element of surprise. The humorist unexpectedly connects things, which we had kept apart in our secondary process thinking. He plays with language is such a way that things we have known for a long time are experienced as new. On the one hand the connection is surprisingly new, on the other hand we recognize it like we do a lost acquaintance. The better the connection fits, the more lustful is the new experience. The more precisely the target is hit, th more completely a whole area is lighted by the flash. We never get enough of experiencing old things in a new way. By the way, this is one of the reasons why there is so much humor in Zen-Buddhism.
III
We are now ready to consider the resemblance o humor to the work of the psychoanalyst. We saw earlier how humor breaks through the compartmentalizing labor of the secondary process. Analogously in the course of a psychoanalysis many partitions between compartments are removed or they become so flexible that the compartments can more freely communicate. Dividing-lines become less rigid. During an analysis a shift of balance takes place between the secondary and the primary process. The primary process which had been pushed away or even paralyzed gets back its liveliness. There is room for humor. The analysand learns to laugh more about himself and the world. As we say previously the language of the secondary process has a tendency to solidify into stereotyped routine forms. Free association lures language away from standardized word formations and toward primary process forms. The analyst through his free floating attention has a heightened sensitivity to the way words function in primary process. He also searches out the words of the secondary process till he finds their primary meaning.
Now it may be clear that conversance with the procedure and technique of humor can help the analyst in developing a sense of primary process thinking.
The way great humorists play with the language of the child in the adult can teach us a lot about primary process. Discovering how imaginatively the child in the adult patient uses his words is also a matter of training in language. In this sense there is an analogy between the daily work of the analyst and that of the humorist: they both are craftsmen who earn their living by the skillful and creative rearrangement of words in order to effect a change in the hearer. As we saw earlier an important aspect of this craft is a receptivity to the-new-in-the-old. The analyst discovers: I thought I understood this, but now it appears in a way I had not understood before. A further point of analogy is the concern with what we call ‘the significant detail’, which is the symbol of the hidden coherence. The detail is the point of connection between two things, which turn out to hang together in a way which we had not realized before. The detail stands for the hidden meaning.
Analogy always implies disanalogy. In our case the disanalogy consists in the very different ways the significant detail operates in humor and in psychoanalysis. The humorist places the significant detail so that one cannot help stumbling over it. He has already painfully made the unconscious conscious for himself. The analysand reveals in spite of himself in the significant detail something of which he is not yet conscious. In the less significant train of words of the patient the analyst is suddenly struck by a word detail, which betrays that something important is hidden behind it. An inexperienced observer overlooks such a detail but for a sensitive eye the detail is glaring. One can compare this to the glaring detail in humor but the patient has yet not overcome the resistance against connecting the two things he wants to keep separate.
IV
The significant detail in humor can play its central role thanks to the ambiguities of language. We propounded earlier that humor exposes the fictional character of language. Word formations which appear as massive structures are at the same time the tenuous yarn spun by our imagination. That part of personality which is closely associated with this fictional character of language is the part we usually call ‘the ego’.
I want to say just a few words about the relevance of humor to our concept of the ego. Generally speaking we may say that Freud was led in his thinking by two great conceptions. The first one was that of the primary and secondary process, the second one was that of the conflict within the ego. The first conception led to the idea of the ego as the swat of reality-testing and rationality. The second conception led to the idea of the ego as imaginary object, as phantasm and as the seat of irrationality.
The second idea is harder to understand than the first one. It is somewhat clarified when we proceed from the insight that one of the ways in which the ego starts its career is as the object of the outside world, and that through this and only gradually the ago becomes an object to itself. Though the process of socialization the ego is split and estranged from itself. This split is partly conscious, e.g.: I talk about myself as an object of my knowing. For the larger part the split is unconscious, the conscious ego is alienated from the unconscious ego. The conscious ls well as the unconscious alienation between the two parts of the ego is a perfectly natural process. In this regard Ernest Becker (1980) speaks of natural neurosis in which language plays a major role. What we call the ego is a building consisting of verbal transactions. Language originally comes form the outside. The ego is the trail left behind by earlier identifications, it is the imprint of the footsteps of the parents in the psyche of the child. It is particularly form language that the ego derives its character of imaginary object, illusory figure of fantasy, phantasmagoria. Because of its inner split and normal alienation the ego is next to seat of rationality and reality-testing also an adulterator, falsifier, faker of reality and an agent of madness. Through its familiarity with the fictional character of language humor exposes this irrational character of the ego. Humor reveals the insoluble contradictions which we must repress in social intercourse. That which presents itself as a massive ego formation is annihilated by humor and disclosed in its airiness.
Analogically in the course of an analysis the substantial world-formations of the patient are dissolved, the ego is exposed as a seat of irrationality. The certainties of language which from childhood on up to now had appeared as realities are volatilized and a new fictional language is created which suits the adult better. When we realize how relevant the procedure of humor is to the study of the primary and secondary processes as well as to the study of the conflict within the ego, it is nog surprising to hear how much insight Freud derived from his treasured collection of Jewish ‘Witze’. For each psychoanalyst a familiarity with the techniques of humor would seem an asset in his daily work.
V
In our exploration of the relationship between humor and the work of the psychoanalyst we must at this point introduce a distinction which opens up a whole area of interconnections. We mean the distinction between surface humor and depth humor. The idea of bringing the contradiction inside our consciousness (which we discussed at the beginning) can elucidate what is at stake here. There are people who are disproportionately amused at the laughable things of others, compared to their lack of understanding of something laughable about themselves. Such people have surface humor but no depth humor. They recognize and can bear the contradictions only as existing outside themselves. Surface humor is not self-reflective. In depth humor one can laugh at oneself, one can implicate oneself in the drama. Surface humor has no lasting effect: the sublime sinks down into its own nothingness and a moment late it arises as if nothing has happened.
For a psychanalyst surface humor is an interesting phenomenon because of its defensive quality. One can escape from a conflict by exposing its relativity. By summoning non-seriousness to one’s aid one can call a halt to seriousness instead of letting oneself be overcome by the gravity of it. Depth humor has passed through seriousness and has reached the non-serious which lies beyond seriousness.
I want to call special attention to the danger of surface humor in the countertransference. The seriousness of the patient may evoke anxiety in the analyst. Because of the anxiety he may lose his patience and with his premature surface humor he may tempt the patient not to take himself so awfully seriously. In subtle ways the analyst may give his patient the feeling that his so-called whining is becoming very tiresome. Surface humor may be a dangerous weapon against the patient, who often is himself skeptical or even despairing of a seriousness which he cannot abandon. If the analyst cannot fathom what moves the patient to keep on being so serious about something, it is tempting to defend oneself by means of surface humor.
These thoughts lead us to the notion of a factor which operates in an area that lies between surface humor and depth humor. We now enter an exceedingly complex field. I can only attempt to point to some essential issues. During an analysis a patient may re-experience stages of development in which he did experience an overwhelming threat from which he cannot escape while at the same time he has no means of coping with it. He feels an anxiety which he cannot endure. Patients sometimes describe it as literally the end of the world, the breaking down, the annihilation of their ego. As one patient said: ‘the worst thing is not to go under, but it is not to come up again not being able to come back anymore.’ The worst thing for the ego is to literally perish. There is probably no greater anxiety than that of a person feeling that the ego is falling to pieces. If the analyst is then not optimally near the patient gets the feeling: ‘so it is true that I can go under without anybody noticing it.’ During these phases the analyst’s humor must temporarily be suspended. We then get a glimpse of the counter-player of humor: walled-up seriousness, seriousness without any escape route. It is a state no one can endure consciously for long. The situation which we describe here is an aggravation of what we mentioned earlier as natural neurosis, namely the split within the ego. The subject-object split within the ego, which normally confines itself to ordinary human misery may deteriorate into severe neurotic suffering. What we often notice during analyses is that the patient must get worse before he can get better. Martin Luther already intuitively perceived this in his notion of ‘immer kränker werden’. As the contradiction exacerbates, the capability to keep distance from the conflict diminishes. Paradoxically the neurotic attaches himself more frantically to the object from which he wants to free himself. It appears that the unhappy attachment must run its full course until the ego becomes an impossibility unto itself. Seriousness aggravating into hopelessness can take such hold of the patient that it crowds out humor. When the state of absolute attachment has been worked through the patient becomes ready for detachment. This has been expressed by Goethe in his ‘Stirb und werde’. The dying refers to the breaking of the charmed ring, namely when the absolute attachment has spent itself. Detachment is characterized by renouncing and accepting, by departure and return.
After one has passed through the end as an absolute it can become relative. One of the implications of detachment is the realization that the solution of insoluble problems consists in being freed from the necessity to solve them. The end is humor. Analysands may tell us that for the first time in their lives they have experienced laughing really with their whole heart. We may say that nothing can attach itself so deeply as the detached ego.
A few words are required about the relationship between detachment and the secondary process. For instance, in severe neurotic depression is the owner of the depression so great through the perverted primary process. Virtue and vice, being admired and being done away with, success and failure are all without limits. The ego is inflated, diffuse and lacks contours. By means of the secondary process the patient learns to correct inordinate greatness and smallness. The combination of detachment with the secondary process makes the self-reflective character of depth humor possible: the ego reflects on the ego. Instead of being depressed the patient learns to laugh at his own pretense of greatness. We must not think however that humor becomes a new ideal of an new illusion. Humor issues from an optimum of disillusionment. To paraphrase Paul Tillich: humor has to do with the capability to take maximal non-being into our being.
The inner coherence of detachment, secondary process and self-reflexive humor plays a role in the countertransference. The patient who alternately makes his analyst great or puny, sublime or ridiculous, often suggests that he refers to the reality of the analyst. If the patient has a subtle feeling for the weaknesses of the analyst, this suggestion can be quite successful. Humor is a significant ingredient in the analysis of one’s countertransference. One may analyze one’s own pretense of greatness or one’s guilt by which one feels a need to be punished by one’s patient. Hereby the self-mockery of humor is an antidote to the ‘furor therapeuticorum’. Thanks to the detachment the analyst can allow himself to become involved in the drama of the patient without getting caught within the magic circle. Albert Pesso once remarked that the most important thing for a therapist is ’not to get killed’, not to be eaten by his patient. Through his detached involvement the analyst conceives of his patient’s words as both lie and truth, disguise and disclosure. He does not listen to the story, he listens through it. In this sense the analyst’s attitude is shot through with humor. The estranged is found again by surprise.
VI
I want to close by pointing to one more (and in a way a conclusive) analogy between humor and the work of a psychoanalyst. Ludwig Börne (who, by the way, made such a tremendous impression on the fourteen year old Freud) uttered the following saying in his ‘Denkrede auf Jean Paul’: ‘Der Humor ist keine Gabe des Geistes, er ist eine Gabe des herzens’. From of old the heart has been the symbol of the totality of man. The heart refers not to a subdivision or to a special function, but to that which embraces and integrates the various functions, to that from which diversity takes its rise. Just like humor psychoanalytic work cannot be reduced to functions like the cognitive, affective, logic, ethic, aesthetic. In analysis a person reacts as a totality to the totality of his surrounding world. So he is exposed to the root contradictions without the possibility of reducing them to concepts which could isolate partial areas or functions. The symbol of the heart expresses yet another characteristic of humor. In contradiction to irony and satire, to the sardonic and the sarcastic, humor has a quality of warmth. As pain and sorrow are shut out warmth disappears because within the grief and sorrow much of the vitality and creativity of the person lies concealed. Creativity then becomes inaccessible.
The person in analysis learns to bear pain and sadness consciously again. In this way a psychoanalyses enhances space for humor. Humor gains depth when the underlying sadness is admitted into the conscious. Humanity is not without an undertone of sadness, because a sense of transitoriness pervades the ground of our being.
Summary
The author defines humor as the capacity to make essential contradictions conscious at the same time. The contradiction may result from the different impact that a word or a statement can have on secondary and on primary process thoughts. In this way there is a resemblance to the psychoanalyst’s work, in which the defenses against primary process diminish, and words obtain both a secondary and primary process conscious meaning. Humor and psychoanalysis reveal the split between rational and irrational ego aspects. Humor may be a useful aid in psychoanalysis when it is used at the right moment and in analyzing one’s own countertransference. During severe neurotic suffering its use is contraindicated.
References
Becker, E. (1980): The birth and death of meaning. Harmondsworth: Penguin books ltd.
Börne, L. (1862): Denkrede auf Jean Paul. In: Gesammelte Schrifte I. Verlag unbekannt
Freud, S. (1905c): Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, G.W.6
Kierkegaard, S. (1846): Afslutende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift. English translation (1944): Concluding unscientific postscript. Princeton Univ. Pr. P. 490
Landmann, S. (1962): Der jüdische Witz. Olten: Walter Verl.
Pesso, A.: Personal communication
Perhaps the best approach to understanding humor is to pay attention first to humor as a procedure and a technique. The procedure of humor is as follows. First an idea is posited. Hereby an emotional tension is evoked. Unexpectedly a second idea is then posited, which stands in a contradictory relationship to the first one, with the result that the two ideas collide. This collision effects an emotional discharge in the hearer, which expresses itself in laughter.
The awareness of contradiction which humor evokes at a conscious level is the expression of contradictions at a preconscious or unconscious level. Human existence is characterized by the interplay of contradictions. As instances of contradiction I mention in a rather arbitrary sequence the following: finite-infinite, great-small, exalted-futile, wanting to live- having to die, good-evil, appearance- reality, truth-lie, egocentric-eccentric, symbol-reality, I am my body – I have (a relationship to) my body, serious – not serious, fate-guilt, order-chaos, Eros-Thanatos, law-transgression, ‘überlegen sein’ – subjected, summum jus – summa injuria. In each of the examples of humor and ‘Witz’, which are discussed in this article, the reader can search out which contradictions are exploited (1).
We must now make an important distinction regarding the ways in which people handle the contradictions to which they are subjected. Either one can repress the contradiction or one can experience the contradiction consciously. A major aspect of humor consists precisely in the acceptance of a contradiction that previously existed unconsciously.
I give a few examples. Take the old jest ‘an egotist is someone who is not concerned about me.’ The person who invented this jest must have accepted the conflict of the contradiction of importance and insignificance and the conflict between one’s own interests and those of others. When Oscar Wilde joked ‘I can resist everything except temptation’, he had brought into his conscious the painful contradictions of strength and weakness, delusion and reality, freedom and bondage, loss and longing, law and transgression. The contradictions of truth and lie and of appearance and reality form a favorite area of exploitation by ‘Witze’ and humor. For instance, a Dominican monk goes to his abbot to ask whether he may smoke while praying and the answer is ‘no’; thereupon a Jesuit goes to his prior to ask whether he may pray while smoking and the answer is in the positive. Another example is the anecdote of two Jews meeting each other in the train. One asks: ‘Where are you going?’ The other answers: ‘To Krakau’, whereupon the first one says: ‘How big a liar you are. When you say Krakau you want me to believe you go to Lemberg. Now by chance I know that you go to Krakau indeed. So why do you lie to me?’
There are several levels on which we can enjoy these anecdotes. There is the level of social intercourse: what we say is susceptible of diverse interpretations, because in what we reveal we also conceal a lot. A second level consists in the conflict of interest between groups in society. Politics is often characterized by lying while one also tells the truth. One game of politicians is to make us believe that it is the other one who lies. A deeper level still is that of the fundamental uncertainty about life, death, truth, the meaning of existence, the existence of God, and furthermore concerning questions like these: what is good and how can I do it; what are the grounds on which the validity of our cultural norms rest? We can not escape from uncertainty regarding the foundations of our words and acts.
The abovementioned anecdotes shock us in our presumed certainties and they reveal that nothing is certain. Acceptance of fundamental uncertainty causes loneliness, both as spate individuals and as groups together, a loneliness which we can only partly endure. We must create certainties to live by. But our certainties tend to become oppressive. Humor is a royal gesture to unmask momentarily the presumption of our certainties. In this sense also it is true that the humorist has internalized the contradictions. The pleasure which humor gives us consists among other things in the awareness that we have the capacity to make a contradiction conscious which previously was unconscious. To do so is to be victorious over the world. It lends a feeling of power: I am not at the mercy of the world outside me, which would overcome me, no! I see through the contradiction and therefore I have power over it.
I shall give a few examples to bring this idea home. One Jew says to the other: ‘I can see what you ate last night.’ ‘Oh yes?’ ‘Yes, you ate mess of pottage.’ ‘You are wrong’, the other replies, ‘that was the day before yesterday’. By taking the contradiction into his own mind he outdoes the other instead of becoming an object of ridicule. The famous Dutch entertainer Wim Kan once said: ‘the only thing that ever changed on this earth is that a couple of people walked on the moon.’ More effectively than a lengthy discourse these words make us conscious of the contradictions of power and impotence, grandeur and misery, kingdom and utopia. The same effect has Multatuli’s dictum: ‘No statement is wholly true, neither this one.’ By contrast take the example of the woman who says: ‘My husband is getting older. If ever something (fatal) befalls one of us, I am going to live in Paris.’ We laugh at this woman because she does not allow the contradiction to become conscious.
II
To gain a further understanding of the contradictions humor exploits, we must consider the relationship between the secondary and the primary process. The possibility to bring contradiction into our consciousness is dependent on the secondary process. By virtue of this process we can move away from our egocentricity. That is why – unlike an adult – a child does not have humor at his disposal. Humor is rightly called the ripe fruit of a painful process of growing up. Humor presupposes cultivation. It requires a considerable amount of reflection to make contradictions conscious. Yet humor has much to do with the child in us. With the full-blown powers of the secondary process we return to the primary process. Humor can be described as the pleasure of returning to the child which formerly was not yet there. Now the adult is again the child i.e. thanks to his adult stature he can experience the child in a way in which the child was unable at that time to experience himself. This was beautifully phrased by Kierkegaard (1846) when he said: ‘the humorist possesses the childlike quality, but is not possessed by it. He constantly prevents the childlike quality from expressing itself directly, but lets it only shimmer through an absolute culture’ (pag. 490). The child is much more at the mercy of the outside world than the adult is. For a child reality is often too overwhelming and his reflection too weak to bring the contradictions into consciousness itself.
How does the secondary process enable the grown-up person to handle the contradictions in such a way as to make them less painful? This is done by way of a mechanism, which we will call compartmentalization. The capacity to keep ideas in separate compartments in our mind is an important aspect of adulthood. In one compartment I know for instance that my life is uncertain and can end any day, in another compartment I don’t know this. If I would say to my friend: ‘till tomorrow, when we will dine together, at least if I shall not have met a fatal accident in the meantime’, then this would be a socially confusing way to mix separate compartments. To take another example: someone can easily be a famous and prestigious man in his specialized field of research and at the same time an emotional cripple of a terrorizing infant in his immediate surroundings. Only if the two compartments are mixed the man may become very comic.
We must now come to speak of language in the secondary process, for this is one of the mightiest means of compartmentalization. In the secondary process, words can reach a level of abstraction and precision whereby one meaning is rigorously separated from other meanings. In humor however, the secondary process meaning of a word collides with primary process meanings of the same word. With words in their abstract meaning the humorist build up a tension in us, he rouses expectations in us, he first holds u captive within the secondary process. Then unexpectedly we receive a blow from the other side, a blow from the other meaning, the primary meaning of the word. We are taken by surprise and for one moment thrown out of balance.
Many jokes are built on this principle of collision of primary and secondary process. For instance: Berlin (said a nineteenth century rabbi) is a city full of godliness for everyone who enters it as a pious man leaves this city as a godless person and thus leaves his godliness behind. The primary and the secondary processes differ in the relationship they have to reality. This difference is exploited by jokes. In the primary process a symbol and the thing it represents are not yet clearly separated. The confusion of symbol and reality can lead to laughter as lustful experience. A Jew e.g. tells his rabbi: ‘people think I am a rich man, but in fact I am ruined.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘My bank-books make this clear.’ ‘Then burn your bank-books.’ A similar anecdote is told in the Mid-West of America, where the farmers objected to daylight saving time because the extra hour in the evening would burn their crops too much.
Word-symbols function differently according to the layer of consciousness which they evoke. In the layer of consciousness in which we think and behave as members of a group, obedient to the rules and codes of the group, a word symbol functions quite differently compared to the way this same word functions in the layer in which vehement feelings are evoked by a concrete situation. Take e.g. the word-symbol ‘bitter’ in the following anecdote (for a correct understanding one must realize that ritual food laws of the Jews were very strict and that in Eastern Europe at that time in cases of doubt the rabbi decided). A poor Jew comes to the rabbi with a slaughtered chicken: ‘Rabbi, is this chicken kosher? It has no gall.’ The Jew heaves a deep sigh: ‘For sure it is bitter, rabbi! My promising son is sick, the doctor says he must have chicken-soup, I sold my pillow to buy the chicken, and now he would not be allowed to eat it! Tell me: is that not bitter?’ Softly the Rabbi decides: ‘If it is bitter, then the chicken is kosher.’ In this anecdote we notice the presence of several concepts I have tried to elucidate: contradiction (namely of rule versus existence), the collision of secondary and primary process and the fictional character of language.
Of this last concept I want to give just a few more examples. When a speaker remarked: ‘the problems around this issue are greatly complicated by its metablems’, he pointed to the fact that language has many possibilities of combination which we don’t exploit but could do so very well. We tend to look upon the arbitrary language codes as if they were things with a fixed character. Precisely by transgressing the codes we reveal their fictional character. Schleiermacher in his bon mot: ‘Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht was Leiden schafft’, makes game of this tendency to treat words as things. Another speaker said: ‘Life is enacted not only in its paradoxes but also in its parasanges’ (referring to Xenophon’s Anabasis). By playing on fictional sounds on the surface, he evokes a contradiction in the depths.
In various ways these examples illustrate that humor shifts- be it for a moment – the balance between secondary and primary process. The secondary process operating in the service of our adjustment to society, has the tendency to make our behavior stereotyped and rigid, a standardized product. The laws and rules of the group, the moral codes and the rigid patterns of language function as a strait-jacket, which makes us suitable citizens. In this sense (as Freud has often indicated) culture is a burden we must bear. This explains the lustful character of humor. Humor fees us momentarily from the dominance of the secondary process. The primary process has full rein, the separation between the compartments is abolished briefly and the tension discharges in the liberating laugh of humor.
We may distinguish two categories in which the regulation of existence through culture takes place. The one is the logical order of rationality, the other is the ethical or moral order. With regard to both these orders the play of humor exploits logical and moral absurdity respectively. The heavy burden of the moral order is played with in the following anecdote. A Jew in the army of the Czar who fought exceedingly bravely could choose between a military order and a hundred rouble. The Jewish soldier asked: ‘this order is worth how much?’ The officer answered: ‘That’s a senseless question, it costs one rouble at the most, but it is a matter of honor’, whereupon the soldier replied: ‘Yes, I get it, just give me then ninety nine rouble and the order.’ In one flashing moment the pretense of the moral order is annihilated, and the fictional and tenuous character of sacred values is revealed. Humor plunges right into the fundamental uncertainty, which we cover with our societal certainties. The Jew as outsider is pre-eminently suited to reveal the nothingness of our cultural codes.
There is a second factor, next to the liberation from the dominance of the secondary process, which explains the lustful character of humor. Humor satisfies the basic human need of new experience. This need of new experience is also called the need of creativity and is distinguished as a fourth basic need in addition to the three basic needs of security, power and intimacy, which psychoanalysts know too well in the context of oral, anal and phallic-genital phases. This fourth need can unfold only after the first three have come into their own. Humor satisfies this need through the element of surprise. The humorist unexpectedly connects things, which we had kept apart in our secondary process thinking. He plays with language is such a way that things we have known for a long time are experienced as new. On the one hand the connection is surprisingly new, on the other hand we recognize it like we do a lost acquaintance. The better the connection fits, the more lustful is the new experience. The more precisely the target is hit, th more completely a whole area is lighted by the flash. We never get enough of experiencing old things in a new way. By the way, this is one of the reasons why there is so much humor in Zen-Buddhism.
III
We are now ready to consider the resemblance o humor to the work of the psychoanalyst. We saw earlier how humor breaks through the compartmentalizing labor of the secondary process. Analogously in the course of a psychoanalysis many partitions between compartments are removed or they become so flexible that the compartments can more freely communicate. Dividing-lines become less rigid. During an analysis a shift of balance takes place between the secondary and the primary process. The primary process which had been pushed away or even paralyzed gets back its liveliness. There is room for humor. The analysand learns to laugh more about himself and the world. As we say previously the language of the secondary process has a tendency to solidify into stereotyped routine forms. Free association lures language away from standardized word formations and toward primary process forms. The analyst through his free floating attention has a heightened sensitivity to the way words function in primary process. He also searches out the words of the secondary process till he finds their primary meaning.
Now it may be clear that conversance with the procedure and technique of humor can help the analyst in developing a sense of primary process thinking.
The way great humorists play with the language of the child in the adult can teach us a lot about primary process. Discovering how imaginatively the child in the adult patient uses his words is also a matter of training in language. In this sense there is an analogy between the daily work of the analyst and that of the humorist: they both are craftsmen who earn their living by the skillful and creative rearrangement of words in order to effect a change in the hearer. As we saw earlier an important aspect of this craft is a receptivity to the-new-in-the-old. The analyst discovers: I thought I understood this, but now it appears in a way I had not understood before. A further point of analogy is the concern with what we call ‘the significant detail’, which is the symbol of the hidden coherence. The detail is the point of connection between two things, which turn out to hang together in a way which we had not realized before. The detail stands for the hidden meaning.
Analogy always implies disanalogy. In our case the disanalogy consists in the very different ways the significant detail operates in humor and in psychoanalysis. The humorist places the significant detail so that one cannot help stumbling over it. He has already painfully made the unconscious conscious for himself. The analysand reveals in spite of himself in the significant detail something of which he is not yet conscious. In the less significant train of words of the patient the analyst is suddenly struck by a word detail, which betrays that something important is hidden behind it. An inexperienced observer overlooks such a detail but for a sensitive eye the detail is glaring. One can compare this to the glaring detail in humor but the patient has yet not overcome the resistance against connecting the two things he wants to keep separate.
IV
The significant detail in humor can play its central role thanks to the ambiguities of language. We propounded earlier that humor exposes the fictional character of language. Word formations which appear as massive structures are at the same time the tenuous yarn spun by our imagination. That part of personality which is closely associated with this fictional character of language is the part we usually call ‘the ego’.
I want to say just a few words about the relevance of humor to our concept of the ego. Generally speaking we may say that Freud was led in his thinking by two great conceptions. The first one was that of the primary and secondary process, the second one was that of the conflict within the ego. The first conception led to the idea of the ego as the swat of reality-testing and rationality. The second conception led to the idea of the ego as imaginary object, as phantasm and as the seat of irrationality.
The second idea is harder to understand than the first one. It is somewhat clarified when we proceed from the insight that one of the ways in which the ego starts its career is as the object of the outside world, and that through this and only gradually the ago becomes an object to itself. Though the process of socialization the ego is split and estranged from itself. This split is partly conscious, e.g.: I talk about myself as an object of my knowing. For the larger part the split is unconscious, the conscious ego is alienated from the unconscious ego. The conscious ls well as the unconscious alienation between the two parts of the ego is a perfectly natural process. In this regard Ernest Becker (1980) speaks of natural neurosis in which language plays a major role. What we call the ego is a building consisting of verbal transactions. Language originally comes form the outside. The ego is the trail left behind by earlier identifications, it is the imprint of the footsteps of the parents in the psyche of the child. It is particularly form language that the ego derives its character of imaginary object, illusory figure of fantasy, phantasmagoria. Because of its inner split and normal alienation the ego is next to seat of rationality and reality-testing also an adulterator, falsifier, faker of reality and an agent of madness. Through its familiarity with the fictional character of language humor exposes this irrational character of the ego. Humor reveals the insoluble contradictions which we must repress in social intercourse. That which presents itself as a massive ego formation is annihilated by humor and disclosed in its airiness.
Analogically in the course of an analysis the substantial world-formations of the patient are dissolved, the ego is exposed as a seat of irrationality. The certainties of language which from childhood on up to now had appeared as realities are volatilized and a new fictional language is created which suits the adult better. When we realize how relevant the procedure of humor is to the study of the primary and secondary processes as well as to the study of the conflict within the ego, it is nog surprising to hear how much insight Freud derived from his treasured collection of Jewish ‘Witze’. For each psychoanalyst a familiarity with the techniques of humor would seem an asset in his daily work.
V
In our exploration of the relationship between humor and the work of the psychoanalyst we must at this point introduce a distinction which opens up a whole area of interconnections. We mean the distinction between surface humor and depth humor. The idea of bringing the contradiction inside our consciousness (which we discussed at the beginning) can elucidate what is at stake here. There are people who are disproportionately amused at the laughable things of others, compared to their lack of understanding of something laughable about themselves. Such people have surface humor but no depth humor. They recognize and can bear the contradictions only as existing outside themselves. Surface humor is not self-reflective. In depth humor one can laugh at oneself, one can implicate oneself in the drama. Surface humor has no lasting effect: the sublime sinks down into its own nothingness and a moment late it arises as if nothing has happened.
For a psychanalyst surface humor is an interesting phenomenon because of its defensive quality. One can escape from a conflict by exposing its relativity. By summoning non-seriousness to one’s aid one can call a halt to seriousness instead of letting oneself be overcome by the gravity of it. Depth humor has passed through seriousness and has reached the non-serious which lies beyond seriousness.
I want to call special attention to the danger of surface humor in the countertransference. The seriousness of the patient may evoke anxiety in the analyst. Because of the anxiety he may lose his patience and with his premature surface humor he may tempt the patient not to take himself so awfully seriously. In subtle ways the analyst may give his patient the feeling that his so-called whining is becoming very tiresome. Surface humor may be a dangerous weapon against the patient, who often is himself skeptical or even despairing of a seriousness which he cannot abandon. If the analyst cannot fathom what moves the patient to keep on being so serious about something, it is tempting to defend oneself by means of surface humor.
These thoughts lead us to the notion of a factor which operates in an area that lies between surface humor and depth humor. We now enter an exceedingly complex field. I can only attempt to point to some essential issues. During an analysis a patient may re-experience stages of development in which he did experience an overwhelming threat from which he cannot escape while at the same time he has no means of coping with it. He feels an anxiety which he cannot endure. Patients sometimes describe it as literally the end of the world, the breaking down, the annihilation of their ego. As one patient said: ‘the worst thing is not to go under, but it is not to come up again not being able to come back anymore.’ The worst thing for the ego is to literally perish. There is probably no greater anxiety than that of a person feeling that the ego is falling to pieces. If the analyst is then not optimally near the patient gets the feeling: ‘so it is true that I can go under without anybody noticing it.’ During these phases the analyst’s humor must temporarily be suspended. We then get a glimpse of the counter-player of humor: walled-up seriousness, seriousness without any escape route. It is a state no one can endure consciously for long. The situation which we describe here is an aggravation of what we mentioned earlier as natural neurosis, namely the split within the ego. The subject-object split within the ego, which normally confines itself to ordinary human misery may deteriorate into severe neurotic suffering. What we often notice during analyses is that the patient must get worse before he can get better. Martin Luther already intuitively perceived this in his notion of ‘immer kränker werden’. As the contradiction exacerbates, the capability to keep distance from the conflict diminishes. Paradoxically the neurotic attaches himself more frantically to the object from which he wants to free himself. It appears that the unhappy attachment must run its full course until the ego becomes an impossibility unto itself. Seriousness aggravating into hopelessness can take such hold of the patient that it crowds out humor. When the state of absolute attachment has been worked through the patient becomes ready for detachment. This has been expressed by Goethe in his ‘Stirb und werde’. The dying refers to the breaking of the charmed ring, namely when the absolute attachment has spent itself. Detachment is characterized by renouncing and accepting, by departure and return.
After one has passed through the end as an absolute it can become relative. One of the implications of detachment is the realization that the solution of insoluble problems consists in being freed from the necessity to solve them. The end is humor. Analysands may tell us that for the first time in their lives they have experienced laughing really with their whole heart. We may say that nothing can attach itself so deeply as the detached ego.
A few words are required about the relationship between detachment and the secondary process. For instance, in severe neurotic depression is the owner of the depression so great through the perverted primary process. Virtue and vice, being admired and being done away with, success and failure are all without limits. The ego is inflated, diffuse and lacks contours. By means of the secondary process the patient learns to correct inordinate greatness and smallness. The combination of detachment with the secondary process makes the self-reflective character of depth humor possible: the ego reflects on the ego. Instead of being depressed the patient learns to laugh at his own pretense of greatness. We must not think however that humor becomes a new ideal of an new illusion. Humor issues from an optimum of disillusionment. To paraphrase Paul Tillich: humor has to do with the capability to take maximal non-being into our being.
The inner coherence of detachment, secondary process and self-reflexive humor plays a role in the countertransference. The patient who alternately makes his analyst great or puny, sublime or ridiculous, often suggests that he refers to the reality of the analyst. If the patient has a subtle feeling for the weaknesses of the analyst, this suggestion can be quite successful. Humor is a significant ingredient in the analysis of one’s countertransference. One may analyze one’s own pretense of greatness or one’s guilt by which one feels a need to be punished by one’s patient. Hereby the self-mockery of humor is an antidote to the ‘furor therapeuticorum’. Thanks to the detachment the analyst can allow himself to become involved in the drama of the patient without getting caught within the magic circle. Albert Pesso once remarked that the most important thing for a therapist is ’not to get killed’, not to be eaten by his patient. Through his detached involvement the analyst conceives of his patient’s words as both lie and truth, disguise and disclosure. He does not listen to the story, he listens through it. In this sense the analyst’s attitude is shot through with humor. The estranged is found again by surprise.
VI
I want to close by pointing to one more (and in a way a conclusive) analogy between humor and the work of a psychoanalyst. Ludwig Börne (who, by the way, made such a tremendous impression on the fourteen year old Freud) uttered the following saying in his ‘Denkrede auf Jean Paul’: ‘Der Humor ist keine Gabe des Geistes, er ist eine Gabe des herzens’. From of old the heart has been the symbol of the totality of man. The heart refers not to a subdivision or to a special function, but to that which embraces and integrates the various functions, to that from which diversity takes its rise. Just like humor psychoanalytic work cannot be reduced to functions like the cognitive, affective, logic, ethic, aesthetic. In analysis a person reacts as a totality to the totality of his surrounding world. So he is exposed to the root contradictions without the possibility of reducing them to concepts which could isolate partial areas or functions. The symbol of the heart expresses yet another characteristic of humor. In contradiction to irony and satire, to the sardonic and the sarcastic, humor has a quality of warmth. As pain and sorrow are shut out warmth disappears because within the grief and sorrow much of the vitality and creativity of the person lies concealed. Creativity then becomes inaccessible.
The person in analysis learns to bear pain and sadness consciously again. In this way a psychoanalyses enhances space for humor. Humor gains depth when the underlying sadness is admitted into the conscious. Humanity is not without an undertone of sadness, because a sense of transitoriness pervades the ground of our being.
- Most of the Jewish jokes in this paper are mentioned in Landmann’s book ‘Der jüdische Witz’ (1962). Many of these jokes are derived from the same sources which were used by Freud (1905c).
Summary
The author defines humor as the capacity to make essential contradictions conscious at the same time. The contradiction may result from the different impact that a word or a statement can have on secondary and on primary process thoughts. In this way there is a resemblance to the psychoanalyst’s work, in which the defenses against primary process diminish, and words obtain both a secondary and primary process conscious meaning. Humor and psychoanalysis reveal the split between rational and irrational ego aspects. Humor may be a useful aid in psychoanalysis when it is used at the right moment and in analyzing one’s own countertransference. During severe neurotic suffering its use is contraindicated.
References
Becker, E. (1980): The birth and death of meaning. Harmondsworth: Penguin books ltd.
Börne, L. (1862): Denkrede auf Jean Paul. In: Gesammelte Schrifte I. Verlag unbekannt
Freud, S. (1905c): Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, G.W.6
Kierkegaard, S. (1846): Afslutende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift. English translation (1944): Concluding unscientific postscript. Princeton Univ. Pr. P. 490
Landmann, S. (1962): Der jüdische Witz. Olten: Walter Verl.
Pesso, A.: Personal communication