250 Note on Freud's Censor [APP. 



to be courting disaster. No doubt a mechanism such as 

 he describes must exist for this purpose. No doubt, also, 

 the avoidance of injury to the psychic arrangements 

 by harmless discharge in dreams, etc., is due to some 

 analogous (probably to a development of the same) 

 mechanism. But this must not be confounded with the 

 censor, to which its functions are ancillary. 



However this may be, it seemed well to quote the 

 facts of this specific case for the sake of honesty. But 

 I cannot feel that they can justly be used as an argument 

 against the teleological function of the censor, consider- 

 ing how open they are to various interpretations, and 

 considering also how clearly that function comes out in 

 the majority of Freud's cases of repression -complexes. 



Next we may consider the objection that, allowing 

 the function of the censor to be directed towards pro- 

 gress, there is still no evidence of freedom. 



This contention receives support from other facts of 

 which knowledge has been gained by the study of 

 psycho-analysis. For instance, very many, if not all, 

 lapsus linguae et calami have a definite meaning, and 

 reveal the existence of repressed wishes or thoughts 1 . 

 And again, if you ask a person to say a number, however 

 large, it can often, perhaps always, be proved that a good 

 reason for saying that number, of which he was totally 

 unconscious, existed in his mind. Indeed psychoanalysts 

 will go so far as to say he could not have said any other 2 . 



On the other hand, if one argues thus one neglects the 

 undeniable fact that, though a certain number rushes 

 first into one's mind, one may reject it consciously and 

 give another. In an experiment upon myself the first 

 number that entered my mind was 473, and I was able 

 partly, though not fully, and certainly not conclusively, 

 to discover the reasons for this by psycho-analysis. But 



1 C. F. Freud, Psychopathology ofEvery-day Life," and E. Jones, 

 Papers on Psychoanalysis. * Ibid. 



