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The term [[censorship ]] in everyday [[language ]] connotes ideas of blame and [[repression ]] of faults.

This is how it appears in [[Freud ]] in [[Studies on Hysteria]]:

<blockquote>"we are very often astonished to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (<ref>1895b, p. 281-282).</ref></blockquote>

In a letter to [[Wilhelm Fleiss (]]<ref>December 22, 1897, in 1950a) </ref> he compares this psychic work to the [[censorship ]] that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time:  <blockquote>"Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).</blockquote>

[[Freud ]] seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients[[patient]]s, in their [[communication ]] with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of [[unconscious ]] [[repression (]].<ref>1896b). </ref>

A second meaning appears when he evokes the [[censorship ]] which, in [[dream-work]], results in a [[manifest ]] text being presented as a riddle (.<ref>Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).</ref>

The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the [[Interpretation of Dreams]].

[[Censorship ]] is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is [[repressed]], at the two successive levels in the passage from the [[unconscious ]] to the [[preconscious ]] (the "antechamber") and on to the [[conscious ]] (the "drawing-room") (.<ref>1915e).</ref>

[[Censorship ]] is thus clearly distinguished from [[repression]]: whereas [[repression ]] rejects a representation and/or an [[affect ]] into the [[unconscious]], [[censorship ]] is what prevents it from re-emerging.

[[Freud ]] nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example:

<blockquote>"We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed." (<ref>1916-17a, p. 429).</ref></blockquote>

With the introduction of the [[structural theory ]] [[Freud ]] made a new distinction, with the [[ego ]] becoming the [[agent ]] of the [[censorship ]] under the superego—the [[superego]]—the merciless supervisor (.<ref>1923b).</ref>

Although the notion of [[censorship ]] continues to be fairly widely used in [[psychoanalysis ]] to describe [[resistance ]] to the [[treatment]], it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.

* [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1895b). On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description "anxiety neurosis." SE, 3: 85-115.