The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious

Oct 11, 2024 10:20 AM

Author:Sigmund Freud,John Carey,Joyce Crick

Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has ever been produced.

Jokes, he argues, provide immense pleasure by allowing us to express many of our deepest sexual, aggressive and cynical thoughts and feelings which would otherwise remain repressed. In elaborating this central thesis, he brings together a dazzling set of puns, anecdotes, snappyone-liners, spoonerisms and beloved stories of Jewish beggars and marriage-brokers. Many remain highly amusing, while others throw a vivid light on the lost world of early twentieth-century Vienna.

Reviews

One of the most successful business books ever

—— Daily Telegraph

Dr. Johnson has the rare ability to be interesting, provocative and succinct. My admiration is complete.

—— Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking

It leaves you feeling upbeat, and excited, and ready to go out and find your own cheese.

—— Better Business

A firm favourite with businessfolk

—— Daily Mirror

highly influential

—— Financial Times magazine

designed to help people thrive during periods of change

—— Sunday Times

a motivational book to help you deal with change in your life

—— Guardian

Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory

—— Andy Martin , Independent

[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists

—— Guardian

[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun

—— Freddy Gray , The Catholic Herald

A day-glo book, illuminating, merry, surreal!

—— The Washington Post

Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!

—— Terry Southern

Not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book... The pushing, ballooning heart of the matter... Vibrating dazzle!

—— The New York Times

An American Classic

—— Newsweek

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