"Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," Sigmund Freud (1905)

"Having been forsaken by Dame Luck, he degenerated into a Lame Duck."

"Wendell Phillips, according to a recent biography by Dr. Lorenzo Sears, was on an occasion lecturing in Ohio, and while on a railroad journey going to keep one of his appointments met in the car a number of clergymen returning from some sort of convention. One of the ministers, feeling called upon to approach Mr. Phillips, asked him, "Are you trying to free the n-words?" "Yes, sir; I am an abolitioinist." Well, why do you preach your doctrines up here? Why don't you go over into Kentucky?" 

"Excuse me, are you a preacher?" responded Phillips. "I am, sir." "Are you trying to save souls from hell?" "Yes, sir, that's my business." "Well, why don't you go there?" 

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious--

"I believe that whatever the motive which actuated the child when it began such playings [taking pleasure in nonsense words], in its further development the child indulges in them fully conscious that they are nonsensical and derive pleasure from this stimulus which is interdicted by reason. It now makes use of play in order to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason." 

"Playing with words and thoughts, motivated by certain pleasures in economy, would thus be the first step of wit. The further development of wit is directed by these two impulses; the one striving to elude reason and the other to substitute for the adult an infantile state of mind."

"The psychogenesis of wit has taught us that the pleasure of wit arises from word-play or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the sense of wit is meant only to guard this pleasure against suppression through reason." 

"The economized expenditure corresponds exactly to the now superfluous inhibition... The hearer of the witticism laughs with the amount of psychic energy which was liberated by the suspension of inhibition energy; that is, he laughs away, as it were, this amount of psychic energy." 

"The essence of irony consists in imparting the very opposite of what one intended to express, but it precludes the anticipated contradiction by indicating through the inflections...that the speaker means to convey the opposite of what they say." 

"It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from the economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the comic from the economy of expenditure in thought, and of humor from the economy of expenditure in feeling. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy." 

"The dream serves preponderantly to guard from pain while wit serves to acquire pleasure; in these two aims all out psychic activities meet." 

"The answer to the question, Why do we laugh at the actions of clowns? would be that they appear to us immoderate and inappropriate; that is, we really laugh over the excessive expenditure of energy." 

"With the elucidation of the technique of wit we asserted that the processes of condensation with and without substitutive formation, displacement, representation through absurdity, representation through the opposite, indirect representation, etc, all of which we found participated in the formation of wit, evinced a far-reaching agreement with the processes of "dream work." 

"The interesting processes of condensation with substitutive formation, which we have recognized as the nucleus of the technique of word-wit, directed our attention to the dream-formation in whose mechanism the identical psychic processes were discovered."  

In other words, word-wit or jokes work like our dreams, they condense information and substitute symbol images from their original context. This makes them, jokes and dreams, communicatively potent but also confusing, and crucially a source of relief from repression. The displacement or substitution enables jokes and dreams to get around censors, both social and deeply personal ones. 

"The power which renders it difficult or impossible for the woman, and in a lesser degree for the man, to enjoy unveiled obscenities we call "repression," and we recognize in it the same psychic process which keeps from consciousness in severe nervous attacks whole complexes of emotions with their resultant affects, and has shown itself to be the principle factor in the causation of psychoneurosis. 

We acknowledge to culture and higher civilization an important influence in the development of repressions, and assume under these conditions there has come about a change in our psychic organization which may also have been brought along as an inherited disposition." 

Which is to say, for me, the key to the continuing relevance of Freud is in this recognition that sexual repression in the individual always has a social or cultural component or the limiting context of civilization. 

This isn't to suggest that there is some repression free individual existence or repressionless society, like Harold O. Brown argues, bless his heart, but liberation from neurotic repression, say, like the recognition of gay or Trans human rights, will always butt up against the repressive norms of society. Or, to put it even more simply, liberation from neurotic repression is, ultimately, to a degree always political. 

It could be argued that the decline of psychoanalysis into cults of personality around guru analysts in the US after WW2 is a side effect of trying to depoliticize Freud's critique, which admittedly Freud tried to do as well to establish the medical legitimacy of the psychoanalytic therapeutic process, the talking cure. But the result of this movement was to neutralize the radical liberatory social implications of psychoanalysis. 

It's still there, this liberatory potential in Freud, but this is why it has been culturally marginalized, because of the threat it poses to unhealthy forms of social repression. 

"Frontier Psychiatrist," The Avalanches (2001):