A] Note on Freud's Censor 249 



in this way; the business of science is abstraction, and 

 only by abstraction can formal knowledge increase; but 

 to cany over the abstraction into the realm of meta- 

 physic, as he does by implication, and more, is unpar- 

 donable. This failing is manifest throughout his work 

 in regard to the censor. The tacit assumption through- 

 out is that the censor's function is to guard conscious- 

 ness; it is the conscious life that is endangered by the 

 things that get repressed; it is for the sake of conscious 

 life that they are repressed at all. The explicit state- 

 ment is that the censor does not exist in the child; for 

 the child's consciousness is not y^et developed sufficiently 

 to feel the pressure of social and other influences. And 

 in face of these facts, we find the assumption that cer- 

 tain things are excluded from the foreconscious, kept in 

 the unconscious (the material of the foreconscious being 

 itself not in consciousness) , by a censor ! This for the 

 sake of completeness in the theory put forward ! I do 

 not quarrel with any of the facts. There may well be a 

 barrier between the unconscious and the foreconscious, 

 but for sanity's sake let us remember that these things 

 are abstractions; for clarity's sake let us attach the same 

 meaning to the word ' censor ' throughout. And above 

 all, for the sake of the dignity of human reason, let us 

 not confound a useful scientific abstraction with reality. 

 In face of Freud's inconsequent and muddled reifica- 

 tion of abstractions, and confusion of terminology, I 

 cannot think we shall gain much light on our difficult 

 'case' by referring the repression to the very dubious 

 censor between the unconscious and the foreconscious, 

 thus tacitly assuming a censor of a sort in animals. The 

 whole conception of a censor seems to me to have mean- 

 ing only in reference to consciousness. To confound a 

 very helpful hypothesis with the known habit -formation 

 directed towards the Avoidance of pain or injury in all 

 living organisms, as Freud definitely does, seems to me 



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