Economics as a Laughing Matter

Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious can be read as a fundamental economic and rhetorical treatise on a number of different levels. Viewed most basically, this work outlines the economizing mechanisms that Freud believes are at work in all unconscious psychic operations. In this regard, Jokes focuses on the third dimension Freud associated with his general metapsychological project, the first two being the topological and the dynamic aspects of psychic life. But on a more profound level, economic thought, structures, and metaphors invade Freud's text in its very rhetoric and discursive structure. However, the parallels between the economics and the rhetoric of this work do not end here. Jokes assume a privileged status in Freud's theory because, as acts of interhuman communicative transfer, they demonstrate that certain psychic structures not only operate unconsciously, but can also be consciously manipulated to achieve strategic psychological effects and affects in others. Jokes thereby manifest the social and rhetorical dimensions of precisely those “economic” principles by which they function. Ultimately, these very same joke mechanisms—deferral, displacement, repetition, anticipatory tension—inform the rhetoric and argumentative structure of this very treatise. Just as the joke-teller invests inordinate intellectual energy in the joke just so that he or she will receive a residual pleasure through the laughter of the joke-audience, Freud as author of this treatise deploys joke-mechanisms to win over his own readers in an effort to gain currency for himself as scientist, and for the project of psychoanalysis more generally

Aesthetics · Allusion · Art · Epistemology · Joke · Linguistics · Literature · Pleasure · Pleasure principle · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Repetition (rhetorical device · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Unconscious mind · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology