Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/140

 one of the known techniques of wit. But we are entirely in the dark as to what determines the witty character of the comparison, since it certainly does not cling to the similarity as a form of expression of the thought, or to the operation of the comparison. We can do nothing but include comparison with the different forms of “indirect representation” which are at the disposal of the technique of wit, and the problem, which confronted us more distinctly in the mechanism of comparison than in the means of wit hitherto treated, must remain unsolved. There must surely be a special reason why the decision whether something is a witticism or not presents more difficulties in cases of comparison than in other forms of expression.

This gap in our understanding, however, offers no ground for complaint that our first investigation has been unsuccessful. Considering the intimate connection which we had to be prepared to ascribe to the different types of wit, it would have been imprudent to expect that we could fully explain this aspect of the problem before we had cast a glance over the others. We shall have to take up this problem at another place.