248 Note on Freud 's Censor [APP. 



exist and play a vast part in our life, and that the con- 

 sciousness is really an organ for perceiving psychic pro- 

 cesses. Given, then, these unconscious psychic forma- 

 tions, he is compelled, by the analysis of dream states 

 and of hysterical and other psycho-neurotic phenomena, 

 to adopt a belief in the existence of two layers (so to 

 speak) of these formations, of which he terms the most 

 primitive, and indeed the primary one, the unconscious, 

 the other, in which the streams of psychic process flow, 

 he terms the foreconscious. It is impossible to give the 

 reasons for such an assumption here, but the facts 

 appear to justify it. He then finds a resistance which 

 prevents wishes, for example, which are in the uncon- 

 scious from entering the more active stream of the fore- 

 conscious. To this resistance he applies the name of 

 censor. But why? Apparently because he finds a 

 similar resistance checking the intrusion of undesirable 

 psychic formations into consciousness, and fails to see 

 how totally different the nature of the two inhibitions 

 must be, since their function is so different. For what 

 does he mean by consciousness? What is its object? 

 Freud himself, the determinist, speaks of the censor as 

 "the criticising instance... which directs our waking life 

 and determines our voluntary conscious actions" (italics 

 mine) 1 . Here is a contradiction indeed ! And it exactly 

 represents, in a few simple words, the contradiction that 

 runs all through his work. He cannot get away from 

 voluntary actions, but because there is a psychic mecha- 

 nism, he speaks of them as determined. Because this 

 theory is presented in his own mind as schematic, he 

 must banish contingency by introducing his schematic 

 system of layers of consciousness, each with its inhibi- 

 tions, as a true and complete picture of reality or if 

 not complete, only falling short by the absence of detail 

 in some matters. Scientifically, he is right to abstract 

 1 Op. cit. trans. Brill, p. 428. 



