Le mot d’esprit (Witz) chez Freud

The abundant distinctions between different kinds of jokes in Freud’s book on Jokes have discouraged many readers. There is a need to find a unity in this multiplicity – a little like Husserl does in his process of eidetic variation. Does the common essence and benefit of all jokes consist, as is often said, in their avoiding a neurotic repression of unconscious desires? Paying special attention to the linguistic expression of jokes and to the process of their social sharing, the author highlights, instead, what they owe to the plea­sure of playing. Although Freud relates this pleasure to a special kind of drive (Spieltrieb) and not to aesthetic imagination, jokes allow us to escape from the constraints of reality, reason, and morals. Playing with words in jokes is like returning to the plays and pleasures of one’s childhood. Emphasizing the playful character of jokes makes one also understand better how they hold the middle between the painful effort to adapt to reality, and the attempt to escape from all reality through the hallucinatory satisfaction of unconscious desires in dreaming.