Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/243

 we dare cite a pertinent quotation from Lipps’s treatise on Komik und Humor, an analysis which throws light on other problems besides the comic and humor. He says: “In the end individual psychological problems always lead us fairly deeply into psychology, so that fundamentally no psychological problem may be considered by itself” (p. 71). The terms “psychic energy,” “discharge,” and the treatment of psychic energy as a quantity have become habitual modes of thinking since I began to explain to myself the fact of psychopathology philosophically. Being of the same opinion as Lipps I have essayed to represent in my Interpretation of Dreams the unconscious psychic processes as real entities, and I have not represented the conscious contents as the “real psychic activity.” Only when I speak about the “investing energy (Besetzung) of