A] Note on Freud's Censor 247 



conscious acts that would tend to undesirable habit- 

 formation. Such an inhibition may be conceived as 

 active in the lower animals, and even in man, though 

 the evidence for this type of inhibition, if it exists, is un- 

 known to me. Undesirable acts are doubtless inhibited, 

 and we call the inhibitory mechanism by what name we 

 like; but to call it a censor seems to me unjustifiable, 

 since the word censor connotes the mechanism which 

 prevents certain kinds of psychic material from entering 

 consciousness, and no consciousness comes in in this case. 

 Would it not indeed be truer to say that the sphere of 

 action of the one censor 1 extends to the unconscious as 

 well as the foreconscious? That is intelligible at least; 

 Freud's suggestion seems to me unintelligible. If there 

 is a lower censor, and this censor does represent inhibi- 

 tions that occur in animals as well as men, clearly the 

 difficulty of the case we are considering vanishes, for 

 consciousness is not involved directly in the repression 

 which is tending towards suicide, and where there is no 

 consciousness there can be no moral problem. Merely, 

 the mechanism is faced with a dilemma, and owing to 

 diseased conditions in the brain-paths the morally 

 wrong solution if morality comes in, which it does not, 

 except by unjustified projection of the onlooker's mind 

 into conditions he only partly understands is adopted. 

 But such an explanation seems to me to be far-fetched, 

 and to depend on the very doubtful existence of a hypo- 

 thetical lower censor, which can only be stated to be a 

 censor if one gives a meaning to the word differing en- 

 tirely from its normal one. Let us then see on what 

 grounds Freud assumes the existence of this queer 

 phenomenon. 



Freud's greatest contribution to psychology is his de- 

 monstration that consciousness is not coextensive with 

 psychic processes; that unconscious psychic processes 



1 In the sense in which we have elsewhere denned it (see p. 162). 



