You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
An editor publishes that which he likes, and refuses that which he dislikes. This is, of course, an over-simplification. There is such a thing as editorial policy, opinion of publishers, advisory editors, pressure of readers, ideology of the times, literary fashion, etc. etc. There is also the unconscious counter-current: dislike against conscious liking, like against conscious resistance which may lead to a host of actions that belong to Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Editors are just as human as their contributors, and editorial prejudice, resistance or preference is also an individual problem liable to psychoanalytic interpretation. If we rarely hear of such problems, it is because the editors like to be written to and not written about. Advisedly, they try to keep their own personality in the background as the cause the publication serves is the thing. If it were not so, the publication would not be worth the printer's ink, and the public would soon let them know.
The first time that editorial prejudice as a psychoanalytic problem was brought to my attention was through a letter from Sir Oliver Lodge. It concerned an article entitled Telepathy — A Survey written by Prof. Sumner Boyer Ely, of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in The Scientific Monthly (the official organ of The American Association for the Advancement of Science) in February 1940. In a symposium of answers published in the May 1940 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, I took issue with Prof. Ely's negative attitude.
Apparently I missed a point of considerable psychological