The soul of wit: Freud's joke book as the analysis of a social psyche

This dissertation is a reading of Freud's Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewusten. As cultural phenomena, jokes confront psychoanalysis not just with an individual, but with a social psyche. Freud's attempts to deal with the inherently social nature of jokes reveal many interesting political subtexts within his psychoanalytic project.;The first three chapters trace the history of theories of Witz from the early Enlightenment up to Freud. Though widely varying in their perspectives, all these texts site Witz within a more or less explicitly political framework. Many of these political issues reappear later in Freud's book.;Chapter four is an examination of the economic motifs found in the joke book, both within Freud's theory (the main principle he uses to explain Witz is that of Ersparnis) and as thematized by the jokes themselves. Connections are made between the levels of psychic, material and cultural economy.;Chapter five takes up issues of the relationship between the bourgeois public sphere, which Witz had helped create, and marginalized groups, specifically with regard to the status of women and Jews at the turn of the century. Witz is shown to be hotly contested as a force which can both subvert the dominant discourse and be used to keep the repressed down.;Chapter six relates Freud's theories of Komik and Humor to that of Witz. The comic breaks down the norms of polite society in which Witz operates, opening up the public sphere to the previously excluded lower classes. This leads to contrasting visions of utopia and social anarchy. Freud tends toward the latter view and so takes refuge in Humor, gallows humor, playing into the turn of the century's mood of 'gay apocalypse.'.;In an epilogue I examine the post-structuralist reception of Freud's joke book. Though these critics identify important tensions within this text, they tend to absolutize them as an inevitable consequence of all writing. I find it more profitable to trace these tensions back to the socio-cultural conflicts described above. This requires a political reading of Witz.