A criticism of Freud's censorship concept. It unfortunately begins with an important misapprehension, for Rivers repeatedly describes Freud's concept as involving an agency 'working within the unconscious', whereas Freud insists that his censorship activity acts at the junction of the unconscious and preconscious. Rivers would substitute for the censorship concept the idea that the distortion and symbolisation observable in many forms of mental activity, dreams, neuroses, etc., are inherent attributes of the unconscious and primitive mind and not, as Freud holds, a compromise-formation resulting from the interaction of the unconscious and preconscious. Rivers thinks that the preconscious plays no part in dream formation, a view surely contradicted by analysis of the material from which the dream is made up.