Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/326

is left out of the question, that it comes about when the person imagines for himself alone, or thinks of something in a graphic manner; that then such a person, just as in talking, expresses through his body the idea of big and small which manifests itself at least through a change of innervation in the facial expressions and sensory organs. Indeed, I can imagine that the bodily innervation which is consensual to the content of the idea conceived is the beginning and origin of mimicry for purposes of communication. For, in order to be in a position to serve this purpose, it is only necessary to increase it and make it conspicuous to the other. When I take the view that this “expression of the ideation content” should be added to the expression of the emotions, which are known as a physical by-effect of psychic processes, I am well aware that my observations which refer to the category of the big and small do not exhaust the subject. I myself could add still other things, even before reaching to the phenomenon of tension through which a person physically indicates the accumulation of his attention and the niveau of abstraction upon which his thoughts happen to rest. I maintain that this subject is very important, and I believe that tracing the ideation mimicry in other fields of æsthetics