„Ein schmales, schwankes Brett“: Freuds Theorie des Witzes

This essay takes a critical look at Freud’s theory of jokes as he presents it in the book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In the first part a joke that was already known in antiquity is used as an example to question the psychoanalytical approach which Freud used to interpret it. A prince asks a man in the crowd who looks exactly like him whether his mother used to work at the court. The man replies “No, but my father did”. In Freud’s interpretation, the man takes revenge on the prince for insulting his beloved mother, in that he finds a witty repartee. The interpretation is problematic because it holds a joke character to be the originator of the joke, confers a spiritual life to it that it does not have and conceals the socially critical message of the joke. The second part of the essay deals with jokes about Jews. At first it is shown how Freud separates himself from traditions, including his own Jewish heritage; however, this alienation from his own eastern Jewish origins makes it difficult for him to differentiate between the antisemitic “humor” and a genuinely Jewish joke. He appreciates the fact that in their humor the Jews are critical of themselves but projects his own prejudices against his own Jewish past in the interpretation of such jokes and gives too much weight to the criticism expressed in them. As already shown in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which he first developed his hermeneutics, Freudʼs anxieties as a Central European Jew of the last generation before the Holocaust can also be detected.