1 What relation does censorship have to secrecy? One might put it this way: every act of censorship is, by its nature, one of secrecy, but not every act of secrecy is one of censorship. Secrecy itself has emerged in different ways as a focal point of interest in science studies. In addition to the other contributions to this special issue, see, for example, for twentieth- and twenty-first-century instances, Galison, Peter, ‘Removing knowledge’, Critical Inquiry (2004) 31, pp. 229–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Secrecy in three acts’, Social Research (2010) 77, pp. 941–974Google Scholar; Peter Galison and Robb Moss, dirs., Secrecy (documentary film, secrecyfilm.com); Masco, Joseph, ‘Lie detectors: on secrets and hypersecurity in Los Alamos’, Public Culture (2002) 14, pp. 441–467CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Proctor, Robert and Schiebinger, Londa (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008Google Scholar; Alex Wellerstein, ‘Knowledge and the Bomb: nuclear secrecy in the United States, 1939–2008’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2010, AAT 3435567. For studies in the early and premodern periods see, for example, Park, Katharine, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection, New York: Zone Books, 2006Google Scholar; Long, Pamela, ‘Invention, secrecy, theft: meaning and context in late medieval technical transmission’, History and Technology (2000) 16, pp. 223–241CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William R. Newman, ‘Alchemical symbolism and concealment: the Chemical House of Libavius’, in Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (eds.), The Architecture of Science, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 59–77. See also Jackson, Myles W., Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000Google Scholar, Chapter 3.

2 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (tr. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson), 24 vols., London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974; hereafter SE followed by the volume number and pages; this reference Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychotherapy of hysteria’, 1895, SE 2, p. 269, from his 1893–1895 studies on hysteria, this part from 1895 (for dating of ‘Psychotherapy’ see ‘Editor's Introduction’, SE 2, p. xv).

3 Freud, ‘Psychotherapy of hysteria’, 1895, SE 2, p. 282. Note that other references of pre-First World War censorship in Freud's writing can be found in Freud, ‘An analysis of a case of chronic paranoia’, 1896, SE 3, pp. 182–183, 85 (these three references to censorship are about another response to censorship – in which the censored feelings of self-reproach are projected into the outside and return in the form of auditory, sensation, and visual hallucinations).

4 Freud, ‘A note on the prehistory of the technique of analysis’, 1920, SE 18, pp. 263–268, 265; Freud records that he received his copy of Börne in 1870. For a full translation see Ludwig Börne, ‘The art of becoming an original author in three days’ (tr. Leland de la Durantaye), Harvard Review (2006) 31, pp. 75–75, available at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/art_of_ignorance_harvard_review.pdf, accessed 7 October 2011.

5 For the historical trajectory of cryptamnesia (also written as cryptomnesia) see Taylor, F. Kräupl, ‘Cryptomnesia and plagiarism’, British Journal of Psychiatry (1965) 111, pp. 1111–1118CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed – a history that began in spiritualism, was then taken up by the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy and brought into broader use by Jung by the early 1900s.

6 For more on the literal and the figurative see the discussion of re-literalization and ‘critical opalescence’ in Peter Galison, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003; on secrecy's multiple valences see Galison and Moss, op. cit. (1). A sophisticated an insightful look at analogy and metaphor in Freud can be found in Draaisma, Douwe, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000Google Scholar (first published 1995). Taking (for example) Freud's Wunderblock (Magic Writing Pad), Draaisma shows how vital analogies are to Freud and how they help him work through, in an essential way, his scientific concepts; each, he argues, functions as a filter revealing a distinct aspect of the concept in question.

7 Here, on censorship, I depart from the work of Carl E. Schorske, whose works I value hugely. Schorske reads Freud as personally in flight from politics, and as systematically arguing for a substantive reduction of politics to the psychological. See Carl E. Schorske, ‘Politics and patricide in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams’, in idem, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Knopf, 1979, pp. 89–107, 101–102 and esp. 91: ‘politics could be reduced to an epiphenomenal manifestation of psychic forces’. An example of the interpretation of censorship as ‘modelled’ on the social (Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna, p. 94): ‘The social model [of censorship] provided an analogy for Freud to show us a quite definite view of the “essential nature” of consciousness’. McGrath, William J., Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986Google Scholar, has a reading that is closer to mine, in that he sees a move from the political to the psychic but does not see this as ‘reducing’ politics to epiphenomena. See esp. pp. 246–247. And the brief entry ‘Censorship’ in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith), New York: W.W. Norton, 1973 (first published 1967), pp. 65–66, 66, is closer still to my view in saying that ‘wherever this term [censorship] is employed, its literal sense is always present’.

8 Forrester cites Freud's letter to Fliess of 18 May 1898 where Freud writes, ‘I shall change whatever you want and gratefully accept contributions. I am so immensely glad that you are giving me the gift of the Other, a critic and reader’; on 9 June 1898: ‘I need your critical help … I myself have lost the feeling of shame required of an author’; and then on 27 August 1899: ‘You will have several more occasions to red-pencil similar instances of superfluous subjectivity’. All from John Forrester, ‘Dream readers’, in Laura Marcus (ed.), Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, Chapter 3, pp. 89–90. Original emphasis. Before the correspondence with Fliess, Freud made two published (and relatively offhand) mentions of censorship in 1895–1896. The first is cited in the text above, SE 2, p. 269. The second, from 1896 (SE 3, p. 169) refers to the censorship of some words of self-reproach. Neither of these two uses of ‘censorship’ is elaborated.

9 The deletions from Freud to Fliess, 22 December 1897, are indicated by ellipses in Freud, SE 1, p. 273; the case is first deleted from the translation of the letter in Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes 1887–1902 (ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris; tr. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey), New York: Basic Books, 1954.

10 Freud to Fliess, 22 December 1897, SE 1, p. 273, original emphasis; the complete version can be found in Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (tr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 287–289; the assault reference on pp. 288–289. It should be said that the US Library of Congress, which holds the Freud papers, regularly blocks out patient names, though in this instance the blocking out went, as is clear above, farther than the removal of identities.

11 Freud to Fliess, 22 December 1897, Freud, op. cit. (10), pp. 288–289.

12 Freud to Fliess, 22 December 1897, SE 1, 273; the last remarks from ‘A new motto’ forward is deleted from the SE, but is reproduced in Freud, op. cit. (10), p. 289. It would seem that the editors deleted the phrases about the ‘new motto’ and ‘smut’ because without the case history of rape and censorship they would have made no sense in the redacted context. Or perhaps one should say that they would have indicated the absence of a ‘best bit’.

13 Choldin, Marianna T., A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars, Durham: Duke University Press, 1985Google Scholar, p. 128; broken down by the reigns of Alexander II and III, on pp. 230–231.

14 Choldin, op. cit. (13), Chapters 6 and 7. On Russian censorship, in addition to Choldin (from which the above is cited and the figures are drawn), on internal censorship see Balmouth, Daniel, Censorship in Russia 1865–1905, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979Google Scholar; and Ruud, Charles A., Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press 1804–1906, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982Google Scholar.

15 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 4, p. 308, in footnote 2, added in 1909.

16 Freud, op. cit. (15), p. 142. On censorship as causing distortion in the wish-fulfilment of dreams see also pp. 160, 175, 267, 308; on the different forms of condensation distortion see pp. 320–323, on inversion see p. 327, on a shift of intensity (‘transvaluation’) see p. 330. In many cases, ‘motive for the censorship is obviously the sexual factor’; SE 4, pp. 180, 207–208. On censorship as preserving sleep by avoiding disturbing thoughts see SE 4, p. 234.

17 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, SE 5, p. 529.

18 Healy, Maureen, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004Google Scholar, p. 135.

19 Freud to Ferenczi, 23 August 1914, in Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi (ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant with the collaboration of Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch; tr. Peter T. Hoffer), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, vol. 2 (1914–1919), pp. 12–14, 13. Hereafter Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence.

20 Ferenczi to Freud, 24 August 1914, letter 499, in Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence, pp. 14–15, 14.

21 Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 25 November 1914, in Freud, Sigmund and Andreas-Salomé, Lou, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters, New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

22 Freud to Abraham, 25 November 1914, letter 256F; Abraham to Freud, 26 December 1914, letter 261A, in Sigmund Freud, Falzeder, Ernst and Abraham, Karl, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1925, London: Karnac, 2002Google Scholar, pp. 285 and 292–293 respectively. Hereafter Freud–Abraham Correspondence.

23 Freud, ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’, 1915, SE 14, p. 279.

24 Freud to Abraham, 1 August 1915, letter 280F, in Freud–Abraham Correspondence, letter 280F, pp. 315–316.

25 Freud to Ferenczi, 31 October 1915, letter 573, in Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence, pp. 85–86, 85.

26 Freud to Ferenczi, 15 November 1915, letter 575, in Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence, pp. 88–89; reference to the publications by Abraham and Lou Andreas-Salomé from Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence, p. 89 n. 3.

27 Freud to Ferenczi, 6 December 1915, letter 581, in Freud–Ferenczi Correspondence, pp. 93–95, 94.

28 Freud, ‘The unconscious’, 1915, SE 14, p. 173, original emphasis; on the dates of composition see Editors, SE 14, p. 161.

29 Freud, op. cit. (28), Appendix C, ‘Words and things’, SE 14, p. 214 (‘Psychological diagram of a word-presentation’).

30 Freud, ‘On the interpretation of the aphasias, a critical study’, abstract from 1897, SE 3, pp. 240–241, 240, original emphasis.

31 Freud, op. cit. (28), pp. 174–175.

32 Freud, op. cit. (28), p. 175.

33 Freud, op. cit. (28), p. 175.

34 Freud, op. cit. (28), pp. 191–194, the long quotation on p. 193.

35 Freud, ‘A note on the Unconscious’, 1912, SE 12, pp. 260–266, 264, emphasis added. A side comment in ‘Moses and monotheism’ analogizes early experience to the latent image on a photographic plate that may only much later be developed. See SE 23, p. 126.

36 Freud, ‘Introductory lectures’, number 19, 1917 (1916–1917), SE 16, p. 295.

37 See Freud, SE 15, p. 5, the ambiguity of the date of Lecture IX hinges on the whether the first lecture day was 16 or 23 October 1915, a point of dispute.

38 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4, pp. 142–143, in footnote 3, added in 1919.

39 Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Lecture IX, ‘The censorship of dreams’, 1915, SE 15, pp. 137–138; from Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, approximately July 1916 according to the Standard Edition.

40 Freud, Lecture IX, ‘The censorship of dreams’, 1915, SE 15, p. 139, emphasis added. The traces of the censor's work are, as these passages indicate, a highly valued tool for both the citizen (in reading the papers and post) and the psychoanalyst (in reading dreams). I would therefore be cautious about saying, as Michael Billig does, that ‘Freud's analogy between repression and political censorship, nevertheless, breaks down. The Austro-Hungarian censors left black passages in those Russian papers [and so] betrayed their handiwork … Successful repression, by contrast, covers its own traces’. See Billig, Michael, Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 55.

41 Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, 27 July 1915, cited in Healy, op. cit. (18), p. 133.

42 Freud, ‘The censorship of dreams’, 1915, SE 15, p. 139, original emphasis.

43 Freud, op. cit. (42), p. 139, emphasis added.

44 Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Idea of the King and the Nation’, in Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6 (ed. G.T. Shedd), New York: Harper, 1864, p. 79.

45 Freud, op. cit. (42), pp. 139–140, 139.

46 Freud, op. cit. (42), pp. 145–146, original emphasis.

47 Quotation and what follows from Freud, ‘The censorship of dreams’, 1915, SE 15, pp. 146–147, Lecture IX.

48 Freud, ‘On narcissism: an introduction’, 1914, SE 14, p. 97, original emphasis (see note 2); in SE 14, p. 100, Freud adds, ‘The ego ideal has imposed severe conditions upon the satisfaction of libido through objects; for it causes some of them to be rejected by means of its censor, as being incompatible’.

49 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5, p. 505. That this was added in 1914 – from Strachey, SE 14, p. 97 n. 1.

50 Freud, ‘We know the ego-censor …’, SE 16, p. 429.

51 Freud, ‘The unconscious’, SE 14, p. 195.

52 Hermann Rorschach, in a letter to W. Morgenthaler (11 November 1919), hoped that the psychoanalytic union in Switzerland could avoid the ‘spirit of bondage’. ‘Even if Freud here and there appears with an all too papal nimbus, the danger of becoming a hierarchy can best be avoided [if they allow] various viewpoints’. In Hermann Rorschach and Walter Morgenthaler, Lieber Herr Kollege! Correspondence between Hermann Rorschach & Walter Morgenthaler (ed. John E. Exner, tr. Manuela Holp), Bern: International Society for Rorschach and Projective Methods. Rorschach Archives, 1999 (1920–1921).

53 Jones to Freud, 31 October 1916, letter 217, in Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939 (ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 320.

54 Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 17 February 1918; Lou Andreas-Salomé to Freud, 27 February 1918, in Freud and Andreas-Salomé, op. cit. (21), pp. 74–75.

55 Freud (authorship not certain), ‘Author's abstract’ for ‘Supplements to the theory of dreams’, 1920, in ‘Editor's note’, SE 18, p. 4. This thought does occur in a variant expression in Freud's ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, SE 18, p. 32: ‘Nor do “punishment dreams” [offer an exception to the proposition that dreams are wish fulfillment] for they merely replace the forbidden wish-fulfillment by the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say, they fulfill the wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudiated impulse’.

56 Jones to Freud, 17 March 1919, letter 234, in Freud and Jones, op. cit. (53), pp. 336–337.

57 Freud to Jones, 19 April 1919, archive letter, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division. Also published in Freud and Jones, op. cit. (53), p. 340.

58 Freud, ‘Negation’, 1925, SE 19, pp. 235–239, 235–236.

59 Rivers, W.H.R., ‘Freud's concept of the “censorship”’, Psychoanalytic Review (1920) 7, 213–223Google Scholar, 213–214.

60 On the dating of ‘The ego and the id’ see Strachey, SE 19, p. 3, citing Jones, E., Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957Google Scholar, p. 104. Quotation is from Freud, ‘The ego and the id’, 1923, SE 19, p. 24.

61 Freud, ‘The ego and the id’, 1923, SE 19, p. 26.

62 Freud, ‘Anatomy of the mental personality’, 1932, SE 22, p. 79.

63 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, SE 4, pp. 209–210.

64 Freud, op. cit. (63), p. 211.

65 Freud, op. cit. (63), p. 212.

66 Freud, op. cit. (63), pp. 212–213, original emphasis.

67 Lowenberg, Peter, Decoding the Past, New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1996Google Scholar, p. 140.

68 Freud, op. cit. (63), p. 214, original emphasis, and note added in 1914, SE 4, p. 215. In the German, ‘the censorship’ is out of the italics but the ‘at this point’ (hier) is in italics. See Freud, ‘Die Traumdeutung’, in idem, Studienausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1972, vol. 2, p. 223.

69 This discussion of Friedrich Adler is drawn from Peter Galison, ‘The assassin of relativity’, in Peter Galison, Gerald Holton and S. Schweber (eds.), Einstein for the 21st Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Many further references can be found there, but a few are Maier, Michaela and Maderthaner, Wolfgang (eds.), Physik und Revolution, Vienna: Loecker, 2006Google Scholar; Braunthal, Julius, Victor und Friedrich Adler, Zwei Generationen Arbeiterbewegung, Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1967Google Scholar; Florence, Ronald, Fritz: The Story of a Political Assassin, New York: Dial Press, 1971Google Scholar.

70 Brugel, J.W., Friedrich Adler vor dem Ausnahmegericht, Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1967, pp. 136–144Google Scholar.

71 Arbeiter-Zeitung, 20 October 1916, p. 1; unredacted version in Adler Archives, Verein Geschichte Arbeiterbewegung, Vienna.

72 Freud, ‘New introductory lectures’, 1933, SE 22, p. 72.

73 For a list of some three hundred of them, see Strachey, ‘List of analogies’, SE 24, pp. 179–184.

74 Freud, ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’, SE 23, pp. 236–237.