Censorship and the Displacement of Irreligion

Abstract

Censorship and the Displacement of Irreligion Freud uses the idea of censorship to illuminate unconscious mechanisms first in Studies in Hysteria 0895), then in Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence 0896 ), and, more importantly, in The Interpretation of Dreams (19oo). ' Yet his most elaborate deployment of the censorship analogy is in the ninth of the Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1916), "The Censorship of Dreams." Here he compares suppression of dream content with the work of press censorship, where the censor has deleted a passage from a journal "and in its place nothing except the white paper is to be seen. ''~ Freud then observes that a writer may forestall the censor by toning down or modifying a potentially offensive passage, or by using "approximations and allusions to what would genuinely have come from his pen. In that case there are no blank places in the paper, but circumlocutions and obscurities of expression appearing at certain points" (ibid.). These techniques of self-censorship in writing would correspond in dream-work to such distorting mechanisms as "softenings, approximations and allusions" (ibid.). Having exhibited two ways in which press censorship is like dream censorship, Freud then states: "I know of no parallel in the operations of press-censorship to a third working by the dream-censorship.., displacement of accent" (ibid.). Displacement, as Freud elsewhere says, involves a shift in the "central point": in the "fresh grouping of the material" either the essential elements appear peripherally, indirectly, or the "psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant. ''3 My aim in this paper is to show that there/s an analogue to displacement in press censorship, and that the displacement analogue offers a promising way of elucidating certain historical texts. To show this I shall be using two irreligious classics, published in 17o6 and 1713. My approach will, in effect, be the reverse of Freud's. Whereas he used the idea of censorship to explain unconscious mechanisms, I shall use his idea of displacement to illuminate the self-censoring techniques of two eighteenth-century critics of religion. I. In section 3 of his once notorious Discourse of Freethinking (l 713), Anthony Collins tries to prove that freethinkers have been eminently virtuous, rather than (as was widely thought) most vicious. Collins considers nineteen virtuous freethinkers---one of whom Standard Edition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof Stgmund Freud (London, 1981), 2: 269; 3: 182-83, x85; 4:3o5-3~ 2 StandardEdition, a5: 139. 3 Standard Edition, 4:3o5 and 15: 174. [6ol] 602 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:4 OCTOBER ~989 is Epicurus, who is shown to be virtuous by the high place he accords to friendship. Collins's concluding comment contains the displacement: "But we Christians ought still to have a higher veneration of Epicurus for this virtue of friendship than Cicero: because even our holy Religion it self does not any where particularly require of us that Virtue. For as Bishop Taylor in his Treatise of Friendship very justly observes, 'the word friendship in the sense we commonly mean by it, is not so much as nam'd in the New Testament; and our Religion takes no notice of it'.''4 Collins seems to be writing here as an Anglican; thus he speaks of"we Christians," "our holy Religion," and the just observation of the Anglican Bishop Taylor (only a third of which I have quoted). Primafacie, Collins appears to be asking broadminded Christians to accept that Epicurus, even though a pagan, was morally admirable--a mildly advanced position in Collins's time, now little short of a truism. That is the manifest thought, as it were; the latent thought is summed up by George Berkeley as follows: "Some of our modern Freethinkers would indeed insinuate the Christian morals to be defective, because (say they) there is no mention made in the Gospel of the virtue of friendship. ''5 Collins's displacement, then, is largely in perspective and "psychical accent": the militant unbeliever attacking the moral defectiveness of Christianity is replaced by a liberal Christian generously admiring the virtue of a pagan. This instance of displacement is representative of much else in Collins's Discourse of Freethinking...