Censorship (psychoanalysis)

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In psychoanalysis, censorship is a mental authority that denies unconscious desires access to consciousness. These wishes can only reach consciousness in a modified, distorted or masked form. The concept of censorship was taken up by Sigmund Freud primarily in the interpretation of dreams .

Meaning and conceptual change in Freud's work

Freud first used the term censorship on December 21, 1897 in a letter to Wilhelm Fließ . He wrote: “ Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper that passed the Russian censorship on the border? Words, entire phrases and sentences are painted over in black so that the rest of the text becomes incomprehensible. “If moments of external information control still play a role here , Freud wrote a few years later in connection with the dream distortion:

“The political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell those in power is in a similar position. If he says it openly, the ruler will suppress his statement, ... The writer has to fear the censorship, he reduces and therefore distorts the expression of his opinion. Depending on the strength and sensitivity of this censorship, he feels compelled either to merely adhere to certain forms of attack or to use allusions instead of direct terms, or he must hide his offensive message behind a seemingly harmless disguise ... The stricter the censorship, the more extensive the disguise, the more amusing the means, which guide the reader to the real meaning. "

- Sigmund Freud : The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

Freud liked to use terms from social life and politics, which he transferred to individual psychology . In the sociology and mass psychology emerging at the time, on the one hand, and neo-absolutism on the other - especially in Austria - Freud started from an analogy between social phenomena and individual psychology. A similar concept formation within psychoanalysis is the occupation that points to military analogies or the concept of psychic instances ( structural model of the psyche ) in the context of the topic , which rather shows legal analogies, see also the concepts of latency and the concepts of resistance in the Psychology and politics . In particular, the term resistance is used by Freud in connection with censorship when Freud speaks of resistance censorship . Censorship represents a weakened form of resistance to repression . Freud explains this weakening of repression with the “ withdrawal of the occupations from all interests of life ” through the desire for sleep. The central meaning of Freud's concept of censorship also results from the fact that censorship hinders and prevents everything that Freud intended with free association . - Mario Erdheim recognizes Freud's real achievement in coping with his own power and size fantasies based on self-analysis .

As early as 1914, Freud began to equate censorship with moral consciousness in his work “On the Introduction of Narcissism”. This later leads him to assign the censorship to the superego in his second topical model. Freud thus takes up thoughts of psychics and moral treatment .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Roudinesco, Elisabeth , Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis . Names, countries, works, terms. Springer, Heidelberg / New York 2004 (original title: Dictionnaire de la psychoanalyse (1997), translated by Christoph Eissing-Christophersen), ISBN 3-211-83748-5 ; Wb.-Lemma: "Censorship", p. 1162
  2. ↑ Freud, Sigmund : From the beginnings of psychoanalysis . Letters to Wilhelm Fliess . Treatises and notes from 1887–1902. ed. by Marie Bonaparte , Anna Freud and Ernst Kris . Introduction by Ernst Kris, Imago. London. 1950
  3. ↑ a b Freud, Sigmund : The Interpretation of Dreams . [1900] Collected Works, Volume II / III, S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M; (a) on “Quote”: p. 147 f. a. Tb.-edition; Tb.-edition der Fischer-Bücherei, Aug. 1966, (a) on “Quotation”: IV. Die Traumverstellung, p. 126 f .; (b) on the term "resistance censorship": p. 459
  4. ↑ Sigmund Freud : Self-Presentation . Collected works, vol. 14, p. 33 ff. Fischer, Frankfurt transcript in the summer of 1924. - First published in: LR Grote (ed.), The Medicine of the Present in Self-Representations, Leipzig 1925d. on-line
  5. ↑ Auchter, Thomas & Laura Viviana Strauss: Small dictionary of psychoanalysis . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-525-01453-8 ; P. 42
  6. ↑ Erdheim, Mario : The social production of unconsciousness. An introduction to the ethno-psychoanalytical process. suhrkamp pocket book science 456, Frankfurt / Main, 2 1988, ISBN 3-518-28065-1 ; P. 90 ff.