The Gesticulating Disquiet
of Those Reduced to Silence
Peter Galison,
Harvard University
4 November 2014
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What better place to begin our question of self, secrecy and censorship than with
Sigmund Freud? By 1897, Freud began to talk about censorship in the mind in terms of
the all-too-real print censorship he lived every day. He was not the only one to notice
that the border blockers took out religiously, sexually, or politically offensive references
to the illegitimacy of czars with “caviar” (black ink) or a paper-mâché overlay of glued
on paper. Censors might re-write a text to obscure their intervention. But at a certain
point, Freud noted, the “Russian censors,” out of haste or arrogance, “no longer take the
trouble to conceal [the censorship] operation.” At that point, the censored texts became
incomprehensible, but only because of the gaps torn from them by deletion. So it is with
apparently delirious dreams. “This censorship,” he repeated in his 1900 Interpretation of
Dreams, “acts exactly like (ganz analog) the censorship of newspapers at the Russian
frontier, which allows foreign journals to fall into the hands of the readers (whom it is its
business to protect) only after a quantity of passages have been blacked out.”1
If Freud began to articulate his idea of psychic censorship in terms of the Russian
border guards, censorship hit more closely and more intensely in World War I Vienna. In
“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” of March-April 1915, Freud vented: “The
State exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but…treats
them like children by an excess of secrecy and a censorship upon news and expressions
of opinion which leaves the spirits of those whose intellects it thus suppresses defenceless
against every unfavorable turn of events and every sinister rumour.”2
Censorship—a means of enforcing secrecy—blocked communication. If the state
wanted it a secret that a munitions plant had burnt, it blacked out references to that fire in
letters and newspapers, radio reports and public announcements. Grand state secrets
might obscure a treaty concluded behind closed doors, they might even disguise the real
reasons for going to war. But censorship was an anti-communicative act that went all the
way down: censorship of telegrams, of newspapers, of radio, of moving pictures—and
most intrusively, of letters. It is this cross-scale interference that should grab our
attention, this attempt in a war of mass mobilization to develop a regime of mass
information control that would touch reporting on an epochal battle and confiscate the
most private communication. For the first time, European and American governments
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devoted the means to pry, sort, or destroy any mediated expressive act, all the post,
telegrams and newspapers.
When a government creates a universal censorship regime, it implicitly theorizes
the nature of communicative action. When someone pulls the distributor rather than a
sparkplug from a car to immobilize it, the act shows reveals something about how the
person thinks automobiles work. The State censors; citizens respond with self-censorship
or censor-evading tactics; the State moves again. The process drives new paths of selfexpression, new socialities, and rewires who we are.
These two lectures form a diptych. In the first paper, the focus is on censorship
and the self it produces in the late 19th century through World War I. Freud and his circle
are witnesses and theorists of new forms of postal, political, and psychic censorship. In
the second paper, the time is now and it is our communication networks that intelligence
agencies, corporations, and cybercriminals are cracking. This time it is not 1914 but
2014, not led by the Great Power governments, but by the alphabet-heavy agencies states
have generated: NSA, GCHQ, DGSE, BND. Like citizens and soldiers of WW I, we are
the witnesses of a state technology that is beginning to formulate a new self. We, all of
us, are trying to understand what it means to live with a permanent archive of all
mediated, expressive acts—to experience a shift in the boundaries of the self. The self
remade, through data archived without horizon and mined without sunset.
1. Blue-Pencil Army
Buried in the Austrian government’s 1912 “Service Book J25a” was a “top
secret” plan to reorganize the Austro-Hungarian State. It was to enter into effect when
the State of Exception was declared. Among the dormant entities awaiting activation was
the War Surveillance Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt), imbued with unprecedented
powers.3 Its Censorship Group would arrange for the blockage of sensitive telegrams,
newspapers and periodicals, and military press releases. Not least, the plan organized
postal censorship of each genus of mail: foreign, domestic, war zone, prisoner-of-war.4
Even before hostilities, Prime Minister Count Karl von Stürgkh put the State on
war footing. On 16 March 1914, he shuttered Parliament, blocking democracy in
general, and specifically cutting off a key escape clause from censorship: reading
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forbidden text into the parliamentary record.5 Invoking the State of Exception Law
(Ausnahmegesetz) of 1869, on 28 July 1914 Stürgkh made the censorship policy public.
The law declared that a) In order to stop the appearance or distribution of printed matter,
there will be a postal prohibition which can be directed against literary or artistic
expressions should these “threaten the public order”; and b) periodicals would be
submitted for review [by authorities] from three hours to eight days prior to publication.
Nailing the coffin shut, on 5 October, Stürgkh installed censorship of the mail, to advance
war aims.6
Meanwhile, the censorship “Newsgroup” hunted forbidden stories: the authorities
could render them “inhibiert” (putting them on hold) or, with their blue pencils,
“remediert” (remediated by demanding the excision from the final copy of objectionable
portions). When it came to physically striking text, the governing principle was to use
only like with like: ink on ink, graphite on graphite to make sure that any dissolving
chemicals applied to the overlay would destroy the underlying text as well. Austrian
censors had learned from the failures of their Russian homologues: by marking ink texts
with an aniline-dye based ink, the Russians had left open the possibility of chemically
dissolving the censor’s ink while leaving the message intact—and spilling secrets.7
What written expressions of thought had to be inhibited or remediated? For the
War Surveillance Office, the answer was clear, at least in principle: everything from the
location of high-level officers, troop concentrations, armament, and coastal defense, to
damages from bombs, fires, and weather. So too were the effects of sanitation,
epidemics, and propaganda. It was forbidden to talk about censors, even the conduct of
enemy censors.8 Censoring censoring: always vital. To process all point-to-point
communication, the bureaucracy looked for missives by suspicious people. Staff packed
up the epistles in bundles of 1,000 and sent them to the Language Group that handled the
scratchings of the thirty languages of their polyglot empire. Once vetted, the “Discharge
Group” stamped for release all cleared and remediated letters, passing the worrisome
ones to the Decryption Group for a closer look.9
The raw numbers show just how deeply the intrusion pushed into everyday life.
Censors vetted 13.2 million telegrams in Vienna over the course of the war, of which
42,000 were sent to the Überwachungsamt for further study, of which 1400 ended up in
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the hands of the police. In late 1916, Vienna was taking in 400,000 letters and postcards
per month.10 Every belligerent nation had a similar story. The 180 American censors of
San Antonio Station and its substations, a relatively minor outpost of the U.S. black-ink
network, scrutinized 120,000 letters in a single October week of 1918.11
Who were these censors? With pressure mounting to put people under arms
and to staff the factories, some censor recruits were those unfit for battle. Authorities
struggled to avoid the insane and unintelligent. There were criminals who looked forward
to swiping goods from the packets that passed before them. There were the hungry and
sick, torn from their families, who stole food from mailed packages, as well as petty
criminals.12 Promotion of the brainy and well-adjusted letter snoops apparently did not
always work. One worker recorded that “In the Kriesgsüberwachungsamt a dear Captain
named Silvatici censors the telegrams. He is bored out of his mind. If he is in a bad
mood because he had to stay here in the surveillance office, he lets the telegrams
disappear, whenever he can. We ought to discuss this.”13 Dear Captain Silvatici may just
have been a grumpy bureaucrat behind secretive walls; others actively opposed the war or
regime. Against these saboteurs, the Office deployed “hyper-censors,” censors of censors
who could monitor the proper behavior of the ordinary anti-scriveners.14
2. Writing Through the Censor
Throughout the war, Freud restively wrote under the censorship. To Lou
Andreas-Salomé, the Russian expat novelist, critic, and intellectual living in Göttingen,
Freud responded three months after the beginning of hostilities: “the offprint you asked
for [Freud’s “On Narcissism”] does not need to go through the censor…”15 For forty
years, even as a student, Freud had depended on the post. In 1873, he castigated his
friend Eduard Silberstein for not having replied, “[I]f I cannot read and write letters I am
afraid I shall catch + + + cholera + + + [sic] out of deadly boredom.”16 The next year, he
confessed that his humorous letters had taken on the tone they had because he had
“ceased keeping a diary” and had “no chance during the six weekdays to deposit
anywhere the little humor and good fun one produces along with everything else in those
six weekdays, which does not mean that I wish to turn my letter into a madhouse.”17
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Throughout Freud’s life, the post was diary and sociality, movement building,
collaboration, and affective bond.
During the war, that correspondence became for Freud both more important and
more fraught. Two of his sons were at the front; the news he got from them ever more
frightful. 30 July 1915 to Lou Andreas-Salomé: “About a week ago our eldest son wrote
that a bullet had gone through his cap and another had grazed his arm, neither of which,
however, had interfered with his activities. And today the other warrior announces that
he has received his marching orders for tomorrow, also northwards.” For Freud the
letters were not ancillary to love and work, they were, in the violent obscurity of the war,
bearers of both. Letters were his means to reason, argue, polemicize, and to organize his
thoughts. Though often blocked to and from the front, what he learned on opening paper
envelopes was his only way of knowing whether his sons were alive, wounded, captured,
or dead. Again to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Your letters are now a doubly precious reward
to me for what I write to you. I say now, for I am almost entirely alone; of all my
colleagues I see only [Sándor] Frerenczi standing out against the military influence and
sticking to the group. … Your letter also contains a precious promise. I should very
much like to read ‘Anal and Sexual’, and if our periodicals can still carry on, I will see
that it gets printed. But how and where should the manuscript be sent…[i]t has been
pointed out to me that all written material sent through the post is subject to strict
censorship. I hope, nevertheless, that it will reach me [in Karlsbad].”18
Freud and Andreas-Salomé’s letters carried no matters of secret diplomacy or
troop maneuvers. So why might Freud have suspected the State of an interest in the
letters? Arthur Schutz, who helped run Austrian censorship in World War I, recalled a
large contingent of censors who were altogether capable of finding fault with some of the
topics under discussion, on grounds of propriety. Perhaps, not incidentally, these blue
pencil wielders might object to “Anal and Sexual”:
We called them the “moral brigade.” Among the thousands of censors, especially
among the older officers, were bigoted old maids, hysterical women and other
people with a derailed erotic, it was fashionable to censor on the basis of “moral
principles.” If a letter was classified “frivolous” or as “obscene,” it was seized by
the absolute power of the virtuously enraged censors.19
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Freud wondered to Andreas-Salomé when the dispersed members of their psychoanalytic
“unpolitical” community would meet again. “[T]o what extent it will turn out that
politics have corrupted us?” Of the war and its impact, “I differ from the pessimists only
in that wicked, stupid, senseless things don’t upset me, because I have accepted them
from the beginning as part of what the world is made of.”20 Throughout 1914-18, war
analyzed in terms of mind; mind analyzed in terms of war.
From 4 to 23 April 1915, Freud composed his essay “The Unconscious,”
(published later that year) and began to articulate a meta-psychological framework for the
working of the mind, the construction of the self, that began, tentatively to test a more
spatialized language. Writing of the process by which a thought can travel from the
realm of the unconscious (Ucs) through the territory of the preconscious (Pcs) and
eventually get to the conscious (Cs), Freud says this:
The Ucs. is turned back on the frontier of the Pcs. by the censorship, but
derivatives of the Ucs. can circumvent this censorship, achieve a high degree of
organization and reach a certain intensity of cathexis in the Pcs. When, however,
this intensity is exceeded and they try to force themselves into consciousness,
they are recognized as derivatives of the Ucs. and are repressed afresh at the new
frontier of censorship, between the Pcs. and the Cs. Thus the first of these
censorships is exercised against the Ucs. itself, and the second against its Pcs.
derivatives. One might suppose that in the course of individual development the
censorship had taken a step forward.”21
Freud saw this tiered re-territorialization of self as a significant modification of his earlier
theoretical frame. By positing these three “psychical systems,” he wanted psychoanalysis
to leave behind what he called “the descriptive ‘psychology of consciousness’,” and to
reformulate the approach in a way that would generate both new content and new
problems. Now psychoanalysis, “seems to take account of psychical topography” within
which it can locate a mental act.
Once more, 9 November 1915, Freud thanked Andreas-Salomé for her letters –
“you know how to cheer and encourage. I would not have believed least of all in my
present isolation, that psycho- analysis could mean so much to someone else or that
anyone would be able to read so much in my words. Naturally, I believe it of you. And
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at the same time you have a subtle way of indicating where gaps become visible. And
where further argument is needed. But, as you know, I always make do with the isolated
and the incomplete.” Back and forth essays went—Freud alerted Andreas-Salomé that
“The Unconscious” was about to appear. But he added that his second son had dodged
certain death: “[h]e happened to be away from the dug-out where the whole crew in
charge of his gun had sought shelter during the battle on the Karst plateau and he was
thus the only one to escape the fate of being buried alive by a direct hit.”22
Letters mixed hope and despair, isolation and consolation. When censors
intervened, it shattered an intimate and urgent part of life. Sometimes letters, packets,
books would simply never arrive, a source of frustration that was hardly unique to Freud
and his correspondents, the complaint echoed across Austria. Stürgkh had given himself
absolute power—and imposed a severe press censorship alongside a suspension of free
speech and association, and the internment of political opponents.23 On 21 March 1916,
Freud consulted his list of letters received and noted that he never got Lou Andreas’s
response to his essay on “The Unconscious.” So she rewrote the letter again from
scratch, replacing the missing one.24 “What I really want to say,” she told Freud, “is how
splendid is the outcome of the whole investigation (the system Ucs contains the thingpresentations; the system Cs contains thing-presentations as well as word-presentations)
and that the Ucs comes off so well in this investigation. And also repression and
censorship become so new and simply clear as mere hushers-up, which must then leave
behind them the entire, as it were gesticulating, disquiet of those reduced to silence.”25
Censorship in Vienna in 1916 also came with the morning newspaper and post.
Freud’s theory of censorship is (in his recent topographical formulation) indeed “new and
simply clear,” its shutting-up function now visible to Lou Andreas-Salomé as it wasn’t
before. She continued in this response to Freud’s “Unconscious” on one level the morethan-metaphorical way anyone in mid-war Continental Europe lived every day:
censorship slammed to silence the “gesticulating, disquiet” of people. But her aim was
directed deeper, into the interior of the unconscious with its restive, unruly thoughts.
Worriedly, Freud wrote Andreas-Salomé on 13 September 1917 “just so that you
shall not take me to be either ill-mannered or deceased, may I say that your promised
offprints have not yet arrived.”26 A few days later, she reported that: “the offprints have
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been returned to me! Presumably a misunderstanding; otherwise incomprehensible.”27
By February 1918, as far as she was concerned, the blame lay at the doorstep of the
Überwachungsamt: “[o]n this occasion the censorship almost relieves me of my scruples
in replying to your letter at once, for it took no less than ten days to reach me from
Vienna and my previous letter seems to have taken a good three weeks to reach you.” 28
Obviously, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote Freud, “we have offended in some way or
other, both of us, only unfortunately I have no idea in what respect.”29 Letters delayed
beyond reason: an expanding anxiety about having done something wrong, but no idea
what that the wrong was. This is the penumbral effect censorship induced: A core of
forbidden knowledge, a growing radius of self-censorship, a widening gyre of self-doubt.
The days after the Armistice remained a time of extraordinary tension for Salomé,
as she reported, with the aftermath of the Russian revolution still threatening on all sides.
To Freud in October, 1918, Andreas-Salomé wrote still from Göttingen: “I am even more
cruelly cut off from my relatives in Russia than during the war, and they in turn are cut
off from their many sons (all officers), who may be shot at any moment without there
being any war.”30 Freud, by return in November 1918, reported a similar state of terror,
precipitated by the news black-out: “I have for long been unable to bring myself to write
to you, or rather to lament to you, e.g. about the fact that for three weeks I have been
without news of my eldest son, knowing as I do how worried and anxious you are about
all your relatives in Russia.” … “Two of my books, which were destined for you, are held
up in Teschen, which is now Czech territory…unable to proceed further.”31 A few weeks
later, at last, the letter arrived. Freud’s missing son was in an Italian hospital in the war
zone. “Earlier communications have obviously gone astray.”32
3. The Dark Import of White Spaces
The white spaces stood like gravestones where censors had buried news. Newspaper
writers chafed under the pressure, even when they could accommodate themselves to the
prevailing order. Ever since its founding in 1889, the Arbeiter-Zeitung had served as the
standard-bearer of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party. With war looming, the
Socialists split—with Victor Adler, psychiatrist and leader of the loyal opposition,
supporting Austria’s war aims. His son, Friedrich, joined forces with international
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socialism, sympathizing (for the moment) with Trotsky and Lenin rather than his father.
Soon and throughout the war, the Arbeiter-Zeitung had to contend with draconian cuts to
their articles by the censors. In December they protested to the censors:
The inner unrest among the population, the perceptible shaking of the original
confidence, had definitely [pushed] the senseless flailing rage [Herumwueten] of
newspaper columns onto [one’s] conscience . The reader must indeed soon come
to the conclusion that where the white spot is, there stands the dangerous truth.33
The “senseless flailing rage” of the newspaper columnists and the readers thwarted by
censorship paralleled remarkably the inner “gesticulating, unquiet” of unconscious
thoughts as they hit the psychic censor.
Editors of the women’s worker magazine from the Social-Democratic Party, the
Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, splashed their views of white spots on the front page for 27 July
1915: “Many of our comrades have asked us in letters, what dangerous thing had been
there? We are pleased about this. We have always been of the opinion that confiscations
have a more provocative effect than the content [of the article] itself.”34 Doubling down,
on 22 August 1916, the editors defiantly proclaimed: “The lead article of this edition has
been completely confiscated… In order not to delay the appearance of the paper, we will
have to forego offering an alternate lead article—perhaps also bound for the censor.
Comrades! Be convinced that our newspaper will not fail to express that which all
women wish for, but there are powers against which ours do not suffice.”35 A year later,
protesting the censorship—and following the censoring of an article on censorship—
Friedrich Adler drew a pistol and assassinated Austrian Prime Minister von Stürgkh.36
While opposition figures protested, mocked, and tried to squeeze meaning out
of the white spaces, government backers feared the salience of blocked text. On 13 May
1915, a loyalist reader wrote to the Vienna censors warning them of the danger presented
by these all-too visible manifestations of the excising pencil: “the newspapers make
possible for enemy nations an all-too intimate glimpse into the special workshops of
censorship. In French and English newspapers already whole articles have appeared on
the psychology of these white spaces. In fact, if the whole message is not removed, it is
possible to extract, rather naturally out of the context of such a blank spot, the contents of
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the objectionable sentences. That can sometimes cause military damage; and occasionally
it has perhaps already occurred.”37
White spaces spoke to the intimate workings of the censorial “special workshop.”
There it is in a nutshell: Over and over in the early years of World War I Vienna, Freud,
his correspondents, indeed the whole population could see the power of the censor every
day through the spaces of destroyed newsprint. The white spaces were provocations, an
all-too visible psychology of the repressed. It took a world war, but with the conflict,
populations around the world lived through the daily deletions, and learned to read
missing lines.
At the same time, psychoanalysts learned to read through blank spaces into the
special workshops of the mind. In Vienna, 1915, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, a
psychoanalyst ally of Freud and one of the earliest psychoanalysts of children, published
a remarkable “Dream That Explains Itself.” “It is obvious,” she wrote, “that in times
when the world war has moved all minds, our dream life will not remain unaffected by
the war’s brazen voice. But it is remarkable that the war events produce in our dream
structures fantasies and desires that we would never admit to ourselves. If I publish the
following dream, it is only on the grounds that it provides a new proof for the powerful,
invincible dominion of the unconscious over the human soul.” The two-page article
related a dream by a “highly esteemed and cultivated” lady, that had left its dreamer
knowing there was something offensive in it, but unable to say precisely what. The
patient: “[D]isgusting, stupid stuff,” she told Hug-Hellmuth, “dreamt by a woman of
fifty, who has no other thoughts day and night but worry about her child!” That child,
her son, was a second lieutenant on active duty.38
Freud immediately seized this wartime dream and used it in his 1915 lecture,
“The Censorship of Dreams,” conveying Hug-Hellmuth’s assessment that “that, for a
psychoanalyst” needs no interpreting. The dream went like this: Our lady-in-the-dream
went to Garrison Hospital No. 1, insisting to the guard that she had to see the Chief
Medical Officer in order to volunteer for service at the hospital. When she said
“service,” the guard immediately grasped that she meant “Liebesdienst,” a term floating
between “voluntary service” and something more like “sexual servicing.” Failing (in the
dream) to find the Chief Medical Officer, she instead arrived at a big and dark apartment
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with officers and doctors disported around a long table. Her dream words to the
assembled:
‘I and many other women and girls in Vienna are ready to …’ at this point in the
dream her words turned into a mumble ‘…for the troops—officers and other ranks
without distinction.’ She could tell from the expressions on the officers' faces,
partly embarrassed and partly sly, that everyone had understood her meaning
correctly. The lady went on: ‘I'm aware that our decision must sound surprising,
but we mean it in bitter earnest. No one asks a soldier in the field whether he
wishes to die or not.’ There followed an awkward silence of some minutes. The
staff surgeon then put his arm round her waist and said: ‘Suppose, madam, it
actually came to …(mumble).’ She drew away from him, thinking to herself:
‘He's like all the rest of them’, and replied: ‘Good gracious, I'm an old woman and
I might never come to that. Besides, there's one condition that must be observed:
age must be respected. It must never happen that an elderly woman …(mumble)
… a mere boy. That would be terrible.’
Accompanying her up the stairs, one of the assembled remarked in the dream, “That's a
tremendous decision to make—no matter whether a woman's young or old! Splendid of
her!” Up she went, with a feeling of “doing her duty.”39
“Where,” Freud asks, “shall we find a parallel to such an event? You need not
look far in these days. Take up any political newspaper and you will find that here and
there the text is absent and in its place nothing except the white paper is to be seen. This,
as you know, is the work of the press censorship. In these empty places there was
something that displeased the higher censorship authorities and for that reason it was
removed—a pity, you feel, since no doubt it was the most interesting thing in the paper—
the ‘best bit’.” This was quotidian experience for Freud, as for all Viennese: the often
capricious excisions by the authorities at the Kriegsüberwachungsamt at Stubenring 1.
So taken with the Garrison dream was Freud that in 1915 he also imported it back
into the new edition of his Interpretation of Dreams. But Freud changed the parallel: not
psychic to political-newspaper censorship, but psychic to postal censorship. “In this
example [of the Garrison Hospital dream], Freud wrote, “the dream-distortion adopted
the same methods as the postal censorship for expunging passages which were
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objectionable to it. The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking
them out; the dream censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble.”40
Back to Freud’s winter 1915-16 lecture, “The Censorship of Dreams,” where he pressed
on the parallel between the actions of the news and psychic censorship. In both, he saw
self-censorship: “On other occasions the censorship has not gone to work on a passage
after it has already been completed. The author has seen in advance which passages
might expect to give rise to objections from the censorship and has on that account toned
them down in advance, modified them slightly, or has contented himself with
approximations and allusions to what would genuinely have come from his pen.” Now,
he concluded, one would see not blank places on the paper, but instead, in the article,
“circumlocutions and obscurities of expression appearing at certain points will enable
you to guess where regard has been paid to the censorship in advance.” Self-censorship
in the press could look even more like the dream censor than the equation,
“…Gemurmel…” = “weisse Flecke”
“Well, we can keep close to this parallel,” Freud continued. “It is our view that the
omitted pieces of the speeches in the dream which were concealed by a mumble have
likewise been sacrificed to a censorship. We speak in so many words of a ‘dreamcensorship’, to which some share in dream-distortion is to be attributed. Wherever there
are gaps in the manifest dream the dream-censorship is responsible for them. We should
go further, and regard it as a manifestation of the censorship wherever a dream-element is
remembered especially faintly, indefinitely and doubtfully among other elements that are
more clearly constructed. But it is only rarely that this censorship manifests itself so
undisguisedly—so naïvely, one might say—as in this example of the dream of ‘love
services’. The censorship takes effect much more frequently … by producing softenings,
approximations and allusions instead of the genuine thing.”41
4. Techniques of Evasion
Freud pushed the parallel analysis of the newspaper-postal and the psychic further. In its
extension, censorship became more-than-metaphor: each modeled the other. Annoyingly,
Freud parses the terms by which he describes the various evasive strategies differently at
different times, but the basic idea is this: dream distortion results primarily from the
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censor, which has the job (as does its human homologue) of keeping the peace by
avoiding disruptive thoughts. Freud: “dream-distortion is a result of the censorship
which is exercised by recognized purposes of the ego against wishful impulses in any
way objectionable that stir within us at night-time during our sleep.”42 For the political
censor, the task is to guard social stability against threats. Freud identified three principal
forms of dream distortion as thoughts pass from the unconscious to the pre-conscious and
conscious: condensation, displacement, and what I’ll call concretization.
4.1 Condensation. In the passage across the border of the unconscious into the preconscious, Freud saw a strategy of minimization, of delivering to the system of
consciousness a much-reduced version of the unconscious (latent) dream thoughts. But
in this contraction, censorship was once again at work, as Ernest Jones made clea in
1918: “ … condensation, like other distorting mechanisms, subserves the function of
evading the endopsychic censor.”43 One way this censor-evading reduction can happen is
precisely through deletion—the “exact analog” of black-outs, white-outs: mumbles,
omissions. It was this political and psychic editing-out that Freud began highlighting
back in 1897, when he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess about Russian censorship. During World
War I, Freud learned more about the effects of censorship as he observed not only his
patients but also the broader, societal response to State censorship; it was during the
conflict that he systematized the action of the censorship and identified and further
articulated the processes by which material could escape the stopping power of the
censor. First, returning to his earliest notion of censorship, he saw that he raw omission
was but one aspect excision, there was also a more extended form of removal that
included the “softenings” and “approximations” that newspapers (and letter-writers) used
to get around the thought blockade.44
Freud also extending his earlier dream studies in a second way, in which a whole thought
in the unconscious appears in the manifest (consciously remembered) dream only in the
form of one of its parts. Only that small bit of the larger thought sneaks its way past the
censor into the manifest dream, a dynamic, so to speak, of synecdoche. Third and finally,
sometimes two or more (latent) dream thoughts fuse to form one single bit in the manifest
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dream. In the Garrison dream, as Hug-Hellmuth already pointed out in her original
article, on dreaming the dream again, the crucial dream thought that “age must be
respected” (Altersberücksichtigung) applies both to the dreamer herself (the unsaid act
mustn’t happen with “a young boy”) and to the chief medical officer (standing in for the
dreamer’s dead husband, whose authorization the dreamer wanted). The censor
condenses in all these ways in the passage from unconscious to conscious: omission,
synecdoche, and fusion.45 All three forms of condensation are strategies of evasion.
4.2 Displacement. Desperate to avoid the heavy hand of the psychic censor, the mind
swaps one thing for another. The 1915 Garrison dreamer, who would be horrified by her
incestuous thoughts about her son, finds a way to swap elements: Liebesdienst might
have meant “love-service” to her in the dream thought; by the time it gets to the censor’s
examining table, it tries to pass itself off as “voluntary service.” Hug-Hellmuth notes and
Freud reiterates that the woman “knows” there is something untoward in the dream. But,
Hug-Hellmuth says, that those “fantasies and wishes” are “strangled by the sharp dream
censorship.” Only displaced references can emerge. On the third repetition of the dream,
the dreamer comes up short and says in the dream, “Oh there’s Karl (her son)—better
freed (Gefreiter) in Vienna than Lieutenant in Galicia,” but she was steeped in
disappointment and anger when, instead of greeting her, her son and his comrades noted
with pleasure that the room looked out on the “Graben” (graves but also the name of a
street frequented by prostitutes), and planned to go to a ball at the Casino. In the
substitution-logic of the dream, “freed” is both freed from the dangers of war and freed
from the mother-dreamer. The “graves” are both death and sex. Freud himself, in his
own correspondence, sometimes swapped words to pass censorship. “Your letter,”
Sándor Ferenczi wrote Freud three weeks into the war, “which illustrates so splendidly
the mood swings, alternating every hour, to which we are all subject, culminates in the
same disparaging assessment of Frau A[ustria] that I, too, had to make.”46 Criticize
Austria for its war, sure, but hide it under a swap that made a country into an (imaginary)
woman.
By 1916, in his “Dream Work” (Lecture XI of his wartime course), Freud makes
it quite clear that the whole point of allusions is to be proof against reverse engineering:
15
the censor must not be able to go back to the original. Allusions used for displacement in
dreams, Freud writes, “are connected with the element they replace by the most
external and remote relations and are therefore unintelligible; and when they are
undone, their interpretation gives the impression of being a bad joke or of an
arbitrary and forced explanation dragged in by the hair of its head. For the dreamcensorship only gains its end if it succeeds in making it impossible to find the path
back from the allusion to the genuine thing.”47 If the allusion wore its base on its
sleeve, it wouldn't be worth much as a disguise to cross the border into the
conscious (or, for that matter, to slip by a bureaucrat in the bowels of the Ministry
of War.
4.3 Concretization. There is no negative in the unconscious, no “either or” only
“and”—hatred and love inseparably bound, a world outside time tangled in profligate
causality running as easily with effects before causes as the other way round —an
altogether alien thought universe. In order to pass the censor, this sprawling, redundant
tangle has to pass under a scrutiny that demands of it an ordered, representable, visual,
form. “To form some idea of its difficulties,” Freud says, “let us suppose that you have
undertaken the task of replacing a political leading article in a newspaper by a series of
illustrations.” People and objects? Not a problem. “[B]ut your difficulties will begin
when you come to the representation of abstract words and of all those parts of speech
which indicate relations between thoughts…” With abstractions, Freud says in his 1916
“Dream-Work,” lecture, you can “endeavour to give the text of the article a different
wording, which may perhaps sound less usual but which will contain more components
that are concrete and capable of being represented. You will then recall that most abstract
words are ‘watered-down’ concrete ones, and you will for that reason hark back as often
as possible to the original concrete meaning of such words.”48 For example, possession
(besitzen = literally: “sit on”) could be represented in a picture by depicting someone
actually sitting on the thing in question. Already before the war, Freud’s Viennese
psychoanalytic colleague, Herbert Silberer offered further examples (from a wakeful but
fatigued state): “I thought of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay” and
simultaneously “saw myself planing a piece of wood.” Or, “I lost the thread in a train of
16
thought” and saw before his mind’s eye “a compositor’s forme, with the last lines of type
fallen away.” In 1914, Freud incorporated these waking concretizations into the
Interpretation of Dreams.49
Riveted during the war by newspapers, Freud read at least four a day.50 Illustrated
front-page stories were part of political news across Europe. In one Viennese periodical,
Die Muskete (The Musket) from the fateful month of July 1914, put a very striking image
on its cover: The dual monarchy with its arcane coordinative political structure became
child-adult, Siamese twins, one head sporting an Austrian, the other a Hungarian hat.
Behind them stands Tsar Nicholas II and beside him a white-coated scientist, the whole
labeled “Russian Laboratory Product.” The caption: “Will the twins be able to move on
their own? Not necessary—we’ll take care of that from Petersburg.” From Vienna
through continental Europe, England and North America, newspaper and journals used
pictures, allusions, and synecdoche to take apart war aims in ways that might, in print,
have fallen to the censors.
Condensing, displacing, and concretizing were all as much strategies of political
writing as they were strategies to pass the psychic censor. As the fighting dragged on,
even the constrained running room that a satirist like Karl Kraus had carved out in
negotiation with the Überprufungsamt censor shrank. Early on, he could follow the
adage “Satires, that the censor could understand, ought be, rightfully, forbidden.” By the
end of the war, the authorities did understand, and ban.51
5. Border-Censors and the Diagram of Self
Ernest Jones was Freud’s loyal correspondent, expositor, and biographer, and a
British neurologist and psychoanalyst. Corresponding through neutral countries, the two
managed to exchange letters, even in the thick of conflict. “Somehow,” Jones recalled,
“the censor never noticed” that he had managed to keep his name high on the masthead of
a German publication.52 By war’s end, Jones, like Freud, Abraham, Hug-Hellmuth,
Ferencszi, Andreas-Salomé, slid effortlessly back and forth between talk of the everyday
“social censor” and “mechanisms of repression and distortion” operating on dreams and
psychoneuroses. Internal censors “plainly” became “more elaborate when the social
censor gained in force and complexity as civilization developed.”53 Censorship had
17
come to play a central role in self, the primary agent of distortion as thoughts crossed the
boundary of the unconscious. Jones, 1918: “The core of Freud’s theory, and the most
original part of his contribution … resides in his tracing the cause of this distortion
mainly to a ‘censor’ which interposes an obstruction to the becoming conscious of
unconscious psychical processes.”54
Even Freud’s critics emerged from the 1914-18 war all too aware of how tightly
bound the psychoanalytic censor was to years of stripped-out letters and newspapers they
had by then experienced. W.H.R. Rivers, from St. John’s Cambridge, favored a
physiological (universal function) and opposed the idea that the operation of the
unconscious could so “wholly” be “in the pattern of the conscious as in the case with
Freud’s censorship.” Freud’s idea was simply too culturally specific: “The concept is
based on endopsychic censorship being supposed to act in the same way as the official
whose business it is to control the press and allow nothing to reach the community which
will in his opinion disturb the harmony of its existence.”55
Universal or not, Freud’s struggle with censorship—inside and out—continued.
Jones wrote Freud on 17 March 1919, relieved, at long last, that the stampers had gone
home: “If only you were here! ... it is good to feel near you again, with no censorship in
between.”56 But Jones had jumped the gun. European and North American governments
were censoring mail, they had simply turned their pencils from external belligerents to
internal political threats. At last, on 18 April 1919, Freud could reassure: “Dear Jones,
The first window opening in our cage. I can write you directly and a closed [sealed]
letter!”57
So intensively had Freud pushed on the reciprocal relation, (psychic censorship ::
newspaper/postal censorship) that he judged it necessary to protest that the psychic
censor ought not be taken too literally. Addressing his readers: “I hope you do not take
the term too anthropomorphically, and do not picture the ‘censor of dreams’ as a severe
little manikin or a spirit living in a closet in the brain and there discharging his office….”
Nor did Freud want anyone to imagine the censor as brain site.58
Though it borrowed as much from topographic anatomy (regional anatomy
emphasizing the relation of parts) as topographic maps, Freud’s image of self was more
shattering than either. He had a mind-schematic that was no longer centered on a single
18
entity, instead “I” is an assembly (Id, ego, preconscious, unconscious, superego, censor).
Self-as-society. In July 1922, Freud wrote “The Ego and the Id,” which appeared in
April 1923.59 As we saw, during the war, Freud had re-framed the theory as topographic.
“Ego and the Id” built simultaneously on the dual sense of topographic: it meant
topographical anatomy and simultaneously alluded to a topographical map.60 “The ego,”
Freud declared, “is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is
itself the projection of a surface [the projection of the surface of the body]. If we wish to
find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of
the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards
and, as we know, has its speech –area on the left hand side.”61 Upside down and
backwards the homunculus had returned, though in a different sense. Furthermore, the
map function of the diagram was not proportional, it was purely relational. So the
diagram both was and wasn’t anatomical, and was and was not cartographic. It was a
new form, a suggestive, relational schema of the mind.
Ten years later, in 1932, to illustrate the topographical-conceptual relations of the
psychoanalytic offices of his “Anatomy of the Mental Personality,” Freud wrote, “I
should like to portray the structural relations of the mental personality…in [this]
unassuming sketch." That diagram published in 1933, shows a revised topography now
with an explicit superego. Note that both the ego and the superego are divided with part
lodged in the conscious and part in the unconscious. The opening at the bottom of the
diagram allows a link with the body—again an echo of an earlier brain topography where
the brain stem led out to the nervous system.62 Were this a spatially proportionate
diagram, which it is not, the id, Freud insists, should be “incomparably greater” in extent
than the ego or pre-conscious.
My argument is this. Freud’s psychic censor was always, from the first mention
in the 1890s to the end, thought through and with the political censor. At first a rough
and ready Russian border guard written into psychology, it later became a sophisticated
Austrian with a blue pencil and the power of Autocracy. Censorship in its earliest days
was a metaphor, but one restricted to a single function: cutting. What happens gradually
in Interpretation of Dreams is the censor grows in elaboration and function, though still
by no means the central feature (the first mention does not occur until some way into
19
Chapter 4). It is during World War I that censorship needed no introduction by allusion,
it is all around, and it is then that censorship becomes a pivot point for Freud’s system. It
is even worth it to Freud to retrofit Hug-Hellmuth’s Garrison dreamer into the
Interpretation in 1919 (precisely at the first mention of censorship) as “exactly like”
postal censorship. It was during the world war that anxiety and frustration with the
infantilizing censorship of edited newspapers and letters erupted as the central idea
explaining and characterizing the distortions of jokes, everyday parapraxes, and dream
life.
Is the relation of external and internal censor one of metaphor? No, for two
reasons. First, by the middle of World War I, the relation (which Freud refers to as a
“parallel”) is much more extended than the myriad limited metaphors Freud invoked at
every turn (the Standard edition indexes more than 250 of them, from aboriginal
populations, agents provocateurs and algebraic equations all the way to witches, X-rays,
and Yellowstone Park. Freud began with the censor in the 1890s, it became more
extended in the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams and lodged itself at the heart of his theory
in World War I, where it came to define the boundaries of Ucs/Pcs/Cs territories,
followed self-censorship, and ramified into the distorting mechanism at the borders of the
unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. Second, and perhaps even more importantly,
Freud took seriously the psychopathology of everyday life—an idea he began developing
in his wartime lectures of 1915-16. The dynamics of patterned errors and distortions in
ordinary waking life were the stuff of dreams. In more intensified form, the same
dynamics were at the core of neurotic behavior. It is this infrastructural theoretical
commitment that ultimately bolters the censor to be more than a metaphor. Unlike
metaphors of the formation of a pearl or even a magic writing pad, censorship
participated in the continuity of psychopathology from daily life through dreams to
mental illness. Endo- and social censors are bound in the way that everyday life, jokes,
dreams and neuroses are bound: through a common logic of affective and cognitive
transformations, traveling through the distorting lens of the internal and external censor.
Throughout 1914-18, there is a ceaseless back and forth between Freud’s
psychoanalysis of the war, and his rendering our innermost selves on the basis of wartime
experience. Following this reciprocal action begins in practices of a sudden, ubiquitous
20
and intimate intervention in the control of thought expression. It takes him, and
psychiatric thought, through strategies of control and strategies of evasion, counter- and
counter-countermeasures on the way to the topographic self, with its dispersed agents.
In our new century, under new pressures headquartered not in post and newspaper
censorship but in cyber-surveillance, it seems that once again, new boundaries of the self
are emerging. Yet it will prove useful to deploy the framework here (specific practices of
information flow, intruders on the flow, strategies of evasion, and a new schematic of
self). Perhaps it will allow us to explore, however tentatively, aspects of an emerging self
in our contested present.
21
Notes
1
"Diese Zensur verfährt ganz analog der russischen Zeitungszensur an der Grenze,
welche ausländische Journale nur von schwarzen Strichen durchsetzt in die Hände der zu
behütenden Leser gelangen läßt." Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed.
James Strachey, vol. 5, (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1953), 529. Available online at http://www.pepweb.org/document.php?id=se.005.0000a&PHPSESSID=f569uea6v1i3oijvrf8evlpfn7#sth
ash.h4BSJXHK.dpuf and (German version) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40739/40739h/40739-h.htm. Translation modified.
2
"Der Staat fordert das Äußerste an Gehorsam und Aufopferung von seinen Bürgern,
entmündigt sie aber dabei durch ein Übermaß von Verheimlichung und eine Zensur der
Mitteilung und Meinungsäußerung, welche die Stimmung der so intellektuell
Unterdrückten wehrlos macht gegen jede ungünstige Situation und jedes wüste Gerücht.
Er löst sich los von Zusicherungen und Verträgen, durch die er sich gegen andere Staaten
gebunden hatte, bekennt sich ungescheut zu seiner Habgier und seinem Machtstreben, die
dann der Einzelne aus Patriotismus gutheißen soll.” Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the
Times on War and Death,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 279. Available online (in
German) at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29941/29941-h/29941-h.htm.
3
Gustav Spann, “Zensur in Österreich Während Des I. Weltkrieges: 1914-1918,” PhD
diss., Universität Wien, 1972, 51.
4
Ibid., 53-55; 113.
5
John Halliday, “Satirist and Censor: Karl Kraus and the Censorship Authorities during
the First World War,” in Karl Kraus in Neuer Sicht: Londoner Kraus-Symposium, ed.
Sigurd Paul Scheichl and Edward Timms (München: Edition Text and Kritik, 1986), 177.
6
Ibid., 177-78, including the order.
7
Spann, “Zensur in Österreich,” 127.
8
Ibid., 141. Every censoring agency I know of censored censorship. In the United
States: “the local Censorship Stations should not disclose to the public any information
relating to the time or place of censorship of mail; the processes of censorship, or the
jurisdiction of the several Committees over mail matter, or any other information about
the Censorship without specific authority from the Censorship board.” James R. Mock,
Censorship, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 69.
9
Spann, “Zensur in Österreich,” 125 (on methods).
10
Tamara Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront: Österreich-Ungarn, das
Kriegsüberwachungsamt und der Ausnahmezustand während des Ersten Weltkrieges
(Wien: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, 2010), 96; 400,00 on p. 94.
11
Mock, Censorship, 1917, 69-70.
12
Spann, “Zensur in Österreich,” 150.
13
The worker was Dr. Ludwig von Talloczys, 15 August 1914. Scheer, Die
Ringstraßenfront, 82.
14
Spann, “Zensur in Österreich,” 128, 152.
15
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 24 November 1914, in Sigmund Freud and Lou AndreasSalomé: Letters [Freud and Salomé Letters], ed. Ernst Pfeiffer and trans. William and
Elaine Robson-Scott (New York: Norton, 1985), 20.
22
16
Freud to Silberstein, 30 July 1873, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard
Silberstein, 1871-1881, ed. Walter Boehlich and trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1990), 26-28.
17
Freud to Silberstein, 18 September 1874, in ibid., 61.
18
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 30 July 1915, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 32-33.
19
Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront, 94 n. 251.
20
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 30 July 1915, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 33.
21
Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition, vol. 14, 192. Freud also states: “a
psychical act goes through two phases as regards its state, between which is interposed a
kind of testing (censorship). In the first phase the psychical act is unconscious and
belongs to the system Ucs.; if, on testing, it is rejected by the censorship, it is not allowed
to pass into the second phase; it is then said to be ‘repressed’ and must remain
unconscious. If, however, it passes this testing, it enters the second phase [where it is not
conscious but could be]. If it should turn out that a certain censorship also plays a part in
determining whether the preconscious becomes conscious, we shall discriminate more
sharply between the systems Pcs. and Cs. [Cf. p. 191 f.]. For the present let it suffice us to
bear in mind that the system Pcs. shares the characteristics of the system Cs. and that the
rigorous censorship exercises its office at the point of transition from the Ucs. to the Pcs
[and from preconscious to conscious].” Ibid., 172.
22
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 9 November 1915, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 35.
23 Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria Hungary (New York: MacMillan,
2000), 18ff.
24
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 21 March 1916, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 39; reply
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 9 April 1916, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 40-43.
25
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 9 April 1916, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 42.
26
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 13 September 1917, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 62.
27
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 18 September 1917, in Freud and Salomé Letters, p.
28
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 27 February 1918, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 75.
29
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 27 February 1918, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 75.
30
Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 4 October 1918, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 84.
31
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 17 Nov 18, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 85.
32
Freud to Andreas-Salomé, 3 December 18, in Freud and Salomé Letters, 86.
33
Letter from editors of Arbeiter-Zeitung to Niederoesterriechischer Statthalter,
December 1914. In Halliday, “Satirist and Censor,” 180.
34
Maureen Healey, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War ad Everyday
Life in World War I (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 133.
35
Ibid., 133-35.
36 Peter Galison, “The Assassin of Relativity,” in Galison, Holton, and Schweber,
Einstein for the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
37
Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront, 123. “A reader” dated 13 May 1915 from archives.
38
Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, “Ein Traum, der sich selber deutet,” Zeitschrift für
ärztliche Pyschoanalyse 3, no. 1 (1915): 33-35. Freud’s gloss of the dream is “The
Censorship of Dreams,” Introductory Lecture IX, Standard Edition, vol. 15, 136-38.
39
Freud, “Censorship of Dreams,” Introductory Lecture IX, Standard Edition, vol. 15,
137.
23
Freud, “Interpretation of Dreams”, Standard Edition, vol. 4, 141.
Freud, “Censorship of Dreams,” Lecture IX (1915-16), Standard Edition, vol. 15, 138.
42
Freud, “Dream Work,” Lecture XI, Standard Edition, vol. 15, p. 146.
43
Ernest Jones, Papers in Psychoanalysis (New York: William Wood and Company:
1918), 193.
44 In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud is more fluid than in World War I about the
relation of latent to manifest content, less concerned about identifying the passage
as one of avoiding the censor. Still, his metaphors often are political, as here, when
he denies that latent and manifest elements are in a simple one-to-one
correspondence: “a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dreamthoughts being submitted to a sort of manipulative process in which those elements which
have the most numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the dreamcontent—in a manner analogous to election by scrutin de liste.”
45
Von Hug-Hellmuth, “Ein Traum,” 35. There is more on condensation in, for example,
Freud, “Dream Work,” Lecture XI, Standard Edition, vol. 15, pp. 171-72: “The first
achievement of the dream-work is condensation. By that we understand the fact
that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an
abbreviated translation of it. Condensation can on occasion be absent; as a rule it is
present, and very often it is enormous. It is never changed into the reverse; that is to
say, we never find that the manifest dream is greater in extent or content than the
latent one. Condensation is brought about (1) by the total omission of certain latent
elements, (2) by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream passing
over into the manifest one and (3) by latent elements which have something in
common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream. [new
paragraph] If you prefer it, we can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for the last only
of these processes.” … “The achievements of condensation can be quite
extraordinary. It is sometimes possible by its help to combine two quite different
latent trains of thought into one manifest dream, so that one can arrive at what
appears to be a sufficient interpretation of a dream and yet in doing so can fail to
notice a possible ‘over-interpretation’.”
46
Ferenczi to Freud, 24 August 1914, letter 499, in Freud-Ferenczi Correspondence vol.
2, pp. 14-15, on p. 14.
47 Freud, “Dream Work” Lecture XI (1916) Standard Edition vol. 15, p. 173.
48
Freud, “Dream-Work,” 1916 Lecture XI, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 15, pp. 175-76. See also Freud, “On
Dreams” Standard Edition, vol. 5, 358-60, no “no” no “either-or” only “and.” “We
might compare [dream visual representability] with the problem of representing in
pictures a leading article from a political newspaper. In such cases, the dream-work must
first replace the text that consists of abstract thoughts by one more concrete, connected
with the former in some way—by comparison, symbolism, allegorical allusion, or best of
all, genetically—so that the more concrete text then takes the place of the abstract one as
material for the dream-work.” Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of
Dreams,” 1917, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 228. Freud added a paragraph on anagogic
interpretations in 1919 to The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Ed., vol. 4, 523-4. See
also Freud, ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1922a), Standard Edition, vol. 18, 216.
40
41
24
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1900, insert from 1914), see Standard Edition,
vol. 5, 344-45.
50
His four regulars in 1916 included “Neue Freie Presse, the Vossische [Zeitung], the
Arbeiterzeitung, and the Krakauer Zeitung, Freud to Ferenczsi, 4 February 1916. [Insert
political cartoon citations here.]
51
Halliday, “Satirist and Censor,” 175. Kraus: aphorism: “Satiren, die der Zensor
versteht, warden mit Recht verboten” (F 309-10, 1919, 40).
52
Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst (London: Transaction
Publishers, 1990), 233, emphasis added.
53
Ernest Jones, “Freud’s Psychology,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis, 39.
54
Ernest Jones, “Freud’s Theory of Dreams,” in Papers on Psychoanlysis, 190.
Emphases added.
55
W.H.R. Rivers, “Freud’s Concept of the ‘The Censorship’,” Psychoanalytic Review 7,
no. 3 (1920): 213-23, on 214.
56
Jones to Freud, 17 March 1919, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud
and Ernest Jones 1908-1939, R. Andrew Paskauskas ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), pp. 336-37.
57
Freud to Jones, 18 April 1919, archive letter, Library of Congress, Manuscript
Division. Also published in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest
Jones, 340.
58
Freud, Lecture IX, “Censorship of Dreams,” Standard Edition, vol.15, 140.
59
On the dating of “The Ego and the Id,” see Strachey, The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, citing Ernest Jones, Sigmund
Freud: Life and Work, vol. 3, 1957.
60
Freud, “The Ego and the Id”, Standard Edition, vol. 19, p. 23. “We shall now look
upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests
the ego, developed from its nucleus, the Pcpt. system. If we make an effort to represent
this pictorially, we may add that the ego does not completely envelop the id, but only
does so to the extent to which the system Pcpt. forms its [the ego’s] surface, more or less
as the germinal disc rests upon the ovum. The ego is not sharply separated from the id;
its lower portion merges into it.”
61
Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (1923), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, p. 25.
62
Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse
(Wien: Internationaler Psychoanalytische Verlag, 1933.)
49