v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 153 



But in the adult there is something more. Men do 

 not generally dream simple dreams. To explain this and 

 other things Freud creates a new entity, the Censor, 

 who is in very truth censor morum. Religion, social con- 

 vention, law, have created a code which governs our 

 very innermost selves far more despotically than we 

 imagine. Many desires are in opposition to this code. 

 We shrink from them. We repress them, refuse to let 

 them come into our consciousness at all ; these old, law- 

 less desires. And so it comes about that perhaps we do 

 not know we have some of them at all, for we have 

 never allowed them to come into consciousness. (It 

 must be clearly understood that the censor itself is an 

 unconscious agent 1 .) How then is it possible to dis- 

 cover their existence? In one way only. By their works 

 ye shall know them. They lie at the root of many 

 diseases ; those diseases are their great works. All the 

 phobias, the unreasoning fears that stalk after a man 

 unseen by all the rest of the world, fear of open spaces, 

 fear of closed rooms, other definite fears whose name is 

 legion, blank unassociated fear of fear; strange and 

 obscene fetish worship, of whose existence few but the 

 students of abnormal mind-states know; impotence; 

 physical weakness, mental weakness; many forms of 

 madness; paralysis of certain types; all these and end-, 

 less other diseases, down to the border-line between 

 eccentricity and disease where lie such things as the 

 comprehensive hospitality of the old maid towards 

 countless and often repulsive pets, are the great works 

 of repression-complexes. An example may serve to 

 illustrate the way in which a repressed idea finds outlet 

 in some distorted form, producing physical symptoms of 

 disease. Mr X. , a man of about thirty, was obsessed with 

 a perfectly formless fear. The paroxysms became more 

 and more frequent, and the result on his physical health 



1 Appendix B. See also the illustrative case given below. 



