The Joke Envelope

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Notes

A plea for the judicious use of jokes during analysis has been voiced by those who view the dynamic social dimension of the joke as consistent with the intersubjective dimensions of analysis (Lachmann, 2003; Newirth, 2006; Schimel, 1978). These authors offer sensitive clinical illustrations of the salutary effects of humor during analysis, but I imagine that debate will continue as to whether or not this type of intervention represents a framework violation.

Unfortunately, Wolfenstein’s presentation, and the few other essays I could locate (Grotjahn, 1972; Sachs, 1973; Volkan, 1975) that deal with the laughter of primitive patients, do not advance the envelope concept and do not focus on the impact of the patient’s jokes or laughter on the analyst’s countertransference experience. Yet this is precisely where the primitive dimension of humor begins to assert itself. Warren Poland (1990) is the sole author to emphasize parallel developments in the analysand’s as well as the analyst’s sense of humor, acknowledging the possibility that the appearance of a joke may reflect an enactment on the part of either or both of the analytic partners.

In fact, prior to any known publication by Bick or Anzieu, Winnicott (1960, p. 45) discussed the notion of a “limiting membrane” that helps differentiate me/notme aspects of self; around the same time, Bion developed his own notion of the “mental skin” (1967, p. 142). Garma (1949) is another author never cited in this regard, who presented excellent examples of skin, envelope, and clothing symbolisms that he felt were predicated upon the mnemic traces of foetal membrane. After Bick, Anzieu carried forward the broader enveloping function of the ego. For interesting and important biographical aspects of Anzieu’s interest in this concept, see Roudinesco (1993, pp. 35–43).

The role of envelopes as “film for inscription” is a very special concept. Anzieu’s idea here is that envelopes serve as the first bundlings of the various skin-ego nexi, or connections (all along the surfaces, folds, orifices, and their muscular thresholds), into or onto which the initially enigmatic signifiers from the outside world will be implanted, impressed, or inscribed (see Laplanche, 1987, p. 45; 1990).

In order for an even rudimentary sense of “space inside” to exist, the neonate will need to have the consistent, and pleasurable, experience that the gaping hole he or she experiences when opening the eyes and looking, or when perceiving sound or breathing—which creates a hole in the closed boundary of the body—can be effectively “sealed” by a finger or nipple, thereby restoring the sense of warmth and patency. As a sense of space inside gradually becomes imaginable, this space is simultaneously experienced as being able to contain objects—the first object being the self-nipplemouth-enveloped-in-space itself! Because the skin is a receptor organ, the sensation just described is experienced as sensual at first. Gradually, however, by virtue of the cumulative effect of continued enveloping sensations, the child begins to have a dim consciousness of what we characterize as “mental” experience. The baby learns to identify with an internal object because the object has first been identified with the infant’s own skin. The baby will now ideally need to enjoy the combined dialogue between surface-skin experiences and the interpenetration of the various envelopes within his budding sense of self, and between his own envelopes and those he eventually experiences as belonging to others (see Biven, 1982; Fenster, 2002; Haag, 1997; Tustin, 1986, 1990). These functions nicely overlap with Thomas H. Ogden’s (1989) characterization of the tasks of the presymbolic autistic-contiguous stage.

Put differently, envelopes are the first step in enabling the perceptual apparatus to struggle and establish the mind’s representational equidistance between the outside world and the inside world, between the desire for reality testing (which mutes hallucinatory mayhem) and the capacity to cathect internal representations (which dilutes the tyranny of pure perception) (Botella & Botella, 2005; Lavallée, 1999).

Pre is a misleading prefix, as we gradually learned, for example, from the case of so-called preoedipal developments. In principle, some of these early traces and mnemic patterns may retain their protomental qualities even after fuller mentalization and representationalization has been achieved in other areas of the personality (as with certain forms of skin disorders in otherwise mature individuals). For more discussion of the meaning of proto in the case of these not-yet-fantasy structures, see Stern (1992).

Space restricts my review, but consider the seminal outcome of Anzieu’s original concept: the sound object and sonorous envelope (Anzieu, 1985, pp. 155–77; Harris, 1998; Lecourt, 1990; Maiello, 1995, 1997), autistic envelope (McClelland, 1993), memory envelope (Enriquez, 1990), sleep container (Kumin, 1996), dream envelope (Anzieu, 1989; Khan, 1962; Missenard, 1990), protonarrative envelope (Stern, 1995, pp. 88–93), visual hallucinatory envelope (Lavallée, 1999), oceanic envelope (containing aesthetic experience) (Ehrenzweig, 1967, pp. 122–27), and others (A. Anzieu, 1990; D. Anzieu, 1993; Brazelton, Koslowski & Main, 1974; Haag, 1997; Houzel, 1996; Lecourt, 1990; Solan, 1998, pp. 164–65).

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur (personal communication, January 26–28, 2008) confirmed that her father worked out his understandings of Freud’s terminology after studying the original German writings and certain French translations of the same, such as A. Berman’s translation of “The Project” in 1956, La naissance de la psychanalyse (Paris: Press Universitaires de France). It would be fair to add that the stimulus barrier function had already been much emphasized by the American ego psychologists (Bellak, Hurvich & Gediman, 1973; Esman, 1983; cf. the essay by Bergman & Escalona, 1949, which was ahead of its time in many ways).

All of these word uses are drawn from Wildhagen & Héraucourt (1970). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 1991), the first English use of envelope appears in 1386 (“For he is most envoliped in synne”), apparently drawing from the late Latin volupēre. Interestingly, the German Hülle (Old High German hullan) is a cognate of the Greek hyle, hyllan, and since the 1200s is used to denote a veil, wrapper, husk, or covering membrane.

I am indebted to Professor Gerhard Fichtner of the Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin, University of Tübingen, for allowing me to search through the Freud—Bibliograpie mit Werkkonkordanz that he and Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo published in German (Frankfurt-am-Main: S. Fisher, 1989, 1999).

A final reference to the Hülle-type wrapping that has been overlooked by students of psychic envelopes appears in Civilization and Its Discontents. Here, Freud acknowledges the possibility of genetic sources of religious and oceanic feelings that even precede infantile helplessness, his preferred focus, but these cannot be known because they are “wrapped in obscurity,” aber das verhüllt einstweilin der Nebel (1930 [1929], pp. 71–72).

Freud’s eloquent expression compares nicely with Didier Anzieu’s own evocative description (1985, p. 105): “The skin ego is the original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over, first outlines of the ‘original’ preverbal writing, made up of traces upon the skin.”.

A prescient notion of Gustav Fechner’s that Freud borrows approvingly in Dreams (1900, pp. 48, 536) and in Jokes (1905, p. 176).

See Lurie (1996), who makes a valid attempt to deal with the notion of the “third,” by emphasizing that the joke straddles the unconscious as well as the conscious, the secondary process and primary process, as moderated by the Third, the Law of the Father. Note that the fundamental role of the “third party” is completely absent from Freud’s comments in his later small essay on humor (1927).

Freud does use the word Einkleidung in the sense of a disguise in his analysis of the Gradiva (1907 [1906], pp. 76, 88), and the word does appear in Dreams (1900, p. 243), when he explains how the ego must enlist secondary revision in order to create a “form” that renders the dream memory somewhat more intelligible. In neither case does he refer to a new concept or noun such as “the joke envelope.”.

Unsigned letter, clearly in Anna Freud’s handwriting, in James Strachey’s file marked “S. E., VIII,” Box x.403 of the Sigmund Freud Collection (with permission from Tom Roberts of Mark Paterson & Associates, Ltd., Sigmund Freud Archives, personal correspondence, May 15, 2002).

On most of the occasions where Strachey translates Einkleidung as “envelope,” Brill (1917, passim) had employed the more pedestrian term “dress.”.

I recently came across a letter from D. W. Winnicott to Esther Bick in which he refers to a form of early, oral “breathing excitement,” related to a sense of breathing as cutting (letter to Esther Bick, June 11, 1953, in Rodman, 1987). A rather unique comment by Freud regarding the meaning of the smile and laughter in childhood further supports the fine line between pleasure and potential overstimulation that is captured by laughter (1905, pp. 146–47, n. 2; emphasis added): “I have one contribution to make to this theme. So far as I know, the grimace [that is] characteristic of smiling, which twists up the corners of the mouth, appears first in an infant at the breast when it is satisfied and satiated and lets go of the breast as it falls asleep. Here it is a genuine expression of the emotions, for it corresponds to a decision to take no more nourishment, and represents as it were an “enough” [Genug] or rather a “more than enough” [Übergenug]. This original meaning of pleasurable satiety may have brought the smile, which is after all the basic phenomenon of laughter, into its later relation with pleasurable processes of discharge.”.

As regards the relationship between sound, language, and the subtleties of the clinical situation, see Rizzuto’s (2002) comprehensive review. The study of laughter is a large and complex topic, and I can only make a summary statement here. Many psychoanalysts since Freud have emphasized the combination of aggressive, envious, and more complex sadomasochistic drive experiences that take expression within the auditory and deeper muscular dynamics that characterize the experience of laughter (Brody, 1950; Kris, 1940; Petö, 1946). If it is the case, as these authors all emphasize, that during laughter the whole body becomes, to a varying degree, an “apparatus for expression,” then our pointing to the existence of a universal psychic joke envelope is most apposite.

It is valuable to recall here that Freud as well spoke of the kindling role of the infant’s cry —“the information from the child’s first scream” (1895 [1950], pp. 318, 366)— and the inaugurating role of the caretaker’s response to this sound. I shall return to this point below.

See Nwokah et al., (1994, p. 32) and Van Hooff (1972), who carefully evaluate Jean Piaget’s views on the development of laughter in the light of recent discoveries.

At this point in my original manuscript, I turned to examine the relationship between the intersubjective dimension of the joke envelope and the special role of empathy. Space constraints, again, have required contraction, but I wish to abstract my main line of thinking here.

Freud derived the term Einfülhung from Theodore Lipps (1883, 1889), the same author whose books on aesthetics and comic humor Freud carefully studied when preparing his own book on jokes. There is no question that Freud admired Lipps’s work, yet the term empathy appears only twelve times in the S. E., and Einfülhung only twenty times in the German collection (Pigman, 1995). He briefly mentioned empathy again sixteen years later in Group Psychology (1921, pp. 108–10). On the whole, Freud did not do much more with the term, though he clearly had begun to comprehend the crucial object relational bond to which this concept points (cf. Kanzer, 1981; Shaughnessy, 1995). As far as the book on jokes is concerned, Freud held that only the lower form of humor—the comic—evokes and requires the mechanisms of empathy or mimetic identification (1905, pp. 187, 193, 197, 226). Jokes may have a comical quality, for added effect, but a joke that is merely comical is a “bad” joke (pp. 203–4). On the other hand, a mature joke is effective without special access to empathy (pp. 187–95). This distinction is by no means a self-evident one, yet I think that Freud was trying to remain consistent with his hierarchical approach to representation and symbolization. That is, the pleasure in the comic, mimicry, and caricature derives from comparing and contrasting our own reactions against the feelings we believe through empathy the comic is actually experiencing (p. 195). Jokes, on the other hand, owing to the more highly symbolized structure of the joke envelope, do not require empathy in order to be effective.

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Moshe Halevi Spero

Full Professor and Director, Postgraduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Weisfeld School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University; Senior Clinical Psychologist, Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, and Department of Psychiatry, Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital; Scientific Associate, American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry.