Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/317



Before concluding we shall rapidly point out a few agreements and differences between the conceptions at which we have just arrived and those that have been known for a long time in the psychology of the comic. The putting one’s self into the psychic process of another and the desire to understand him is obviously nothing else than the “comic burrowing” (komisches Leihen) which has played a part in the analysis of the comic ever since the time of Jean Paul; the “comparing” of the psychic process of another with our own corresponds to a “psychological contrast,” for which we here at last find a place, after we did not know what to do with it in wit. But in our explanation of comic pleasure we take issue with many authors who contend that this pleasure originates through the fluctuation of our attention to and fro between contrasting ideas. We are unable to see how such a mechanism could produce pleasure, and we point to the fact that in the comparing of contrasts there results a difference in expenditure which, if not used for anything else, becomes capable of discharge and hence a source of pleasure. Also Bergson (Laughter, An essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Brereton and Rothwell, The Macmillan Co., 1914) rejects with sound arguments this sort of explanation of comic pleasure, which has unmistakably been influenced by the effort to create an analogy to the laughing of a person tickled. The