Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/308

 Gesundheit” (God bless you!; literally, may you be healthy!) whenever she happened to sneeze. While suffering from a severe cold during which the profuse coughing and sneezing caused her considerable pain, she pointed to her chest and said to her father, “Daddy, Gesundheit hurts.”

Another little girl of four years heard her parents refer to a Jewish acquaintance as a Hebrew, and on later hearing the latter’s wife referred to as Mrs. X, she corrected her mother, saying, “No, that is not her name; if her husband is a Hebrew she is a Shebrew.”

In the first example the wit is produced through the use of a contiguous association in the form of an abstract thought for the concrete action. The child so often heard the word “Gesundheit” associated with sneezing that she took it for the act itself. While the second example may be designated as word-wit formed by the technique of sound similarity. The child divided the word Hebrew into He-brew and having been taught the genders of the personal pronouns, she naturally imagined that if the man is a He-brew his wife must be a She-brew. Both examples could have originated as real witticisms upon which we would have unwillingly bestowed a little mild laughter. But as examples of naïveté they