Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/314

 misleading, I shall distinguish more sharply between two cases that I had treated as one in the above discussion. The naïve, as it appears to us, may either be in the nature of a witticism, as in our example, or an obscenity, or of anything generally objectionable; which becomes especially evident if the naïve is expressed not in speech but in action. This latter case is really misleading; for it might lead one to assume that the pleasure originated from the economized and transformed indignation. The first case is the illuminating one. The naïve speech in the example “Hebrew” can produce the effect of a light witticism and give no cause for indignation; it is certainly the more rare, or the more pure and by far the more instructive case. In so far as we think that the child took the syllable “he” in “Hebrew” seriously, and without any additional reason identified it with the masculine personal pronoun, the increase in pleasure as a result of hearing it has no longer anything to do with the pleasure of the wit. We shall now consider what has been said from two viewpoints, first how it came into existence in the mind of the child, and secondly, how it would occur to us. In following this comparison we find that the child has discovered an identity and has overcome barriers