ABSTRACT
The dream and the lapsus are only ever of value to the extent that they elude a particular person's consciousness. They pertain to one's irreducible singularity, and their interpretation only has value for one individual, although that may not please Jung. Among the formations of the unconscious, the joke, on the contrary, has the particularity if not to collectivise at least to function beyond the particular, at least for all those who share a language and a culture. It thus offers the general model of the possible latency, to use the Freudian term, of the unconscious. Functioning at the level of common speech, on the lower chain of the graph, the joke testifies to the possible presence of another discourse within speech, the latency of another saying within vigilant speech. The lapsus, in contrast, is not lucubrated: it is epiphanic because it is in itself a ciphering. It makes an unexpected sign emerge in speech, not programmed by vigilant speech.
