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Freud’s Theory of Humor

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Freud’s theory of jokes; Freud’s theory of joke-work; Psychoanalytic theory of humor; Psychoanalytic theory of humor; Psychoanalytic theory of jokes

Definition

The following entry describes Freud’s (1900, 1905, 1928) psychoanalytic theory of jokes, humor, and their relation to unconscious processes.

Introduction

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Sigmund Freud made many preliminary connections between the psychic processes found in the production of dreams and with the production of humor. Encouraged by a correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud went on to write a book entirely devoted to an examination of the comic, humor, and jokes, entitled Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Freud later reflected that this work “considered humor really from the economic view alone,” and remedied this with the short paper Humour (1928), which included a view of humor from his revised structural model of the psyche (p. 1). Freud’s structural model was largely...

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Correspondence to Maria Christoff .

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Christoff, M., Dauphin, B. (2017). Freud’s Theory of Humor. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_588-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_588-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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