Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/58

 rejected Lohengrin?” was a question asked some time ago. The answer was, “On Elsa’s (Alsace) account.”

(b) Cases where a double meaning is obtained by using a word which has both a verbal and metaphoric sense furnish an abundant source for the technique of wit. A medical colleague, who was well known for his wit, once said to Arthur Schnitzler, the writer: “I am not at all surprised that you became a great poet. Your father had already held up the mirror to his contemporaries.” The mirror used by the father of the writer, the famous Dr. Schnitzler, was the laryngoscope. According to the well-known quotation from Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2), the object of the play as well as the writer who creates it is to “hold, as ’t were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

(c) Cases of actual double meaning or play on words—the ideal case, as it were, of manifold application. Here no violence is done to the word. It is not torn into syllables. It need not undergo any modifications. It need not exchange its own particular sphere, say as a proper name, for another. Thanks to certain circumstances it can express two meanings just as