ABSTRACT
Freud was originally a neurologist. His early neuroscience book, On aphasia, prefigured psychological ideas in his later dream book. His Viennese contemporary, Otto Pötzl, employed tachistoscopic stimuli with neurologically intact patients to produce aphasic errors similar to those found in dreams. In the 1950s Charles Fisher reproduced and extended Pötzl’s findings with fantasy and dreams. Freud emphasized the distinction between manifest (surface) and latent (deeper) contents. According to Freud, the dream-work (censorship, condensation, displacement, plastic representation, symbolism, and secondary elaboration) translates the latent content into the manifest content. The latent content, however, may be alternatively formalized as the interaction between manifest content and context. Some generally conceded errors in Freud’s dream theory include his notions that dreams are wish-fulfillments and that dreams are guardians of sleep. Freud’s theory of jokes is essentially the same as his theory of dreams: Jokes have surface and deeper levels of meaning; jokes need to be interpreted; the joke-work is the joke counterpart of the dream-work. For jokes, however, Freud makes a distinction, which he does not make for dreams, between tendentious (nasty) and innocent jokes.
