J. Allan Hobson and Edward Pace-Schott's Response Commentary by Beatrice W. Smirnow

In Neuro-Psychoanalysis (Vol. 1, No. 2) Drs. Braun and Hobson both question the validity of Freud's formulation of the dream's censoring function, in view of the results of recent imaging studies demonstrating that areas of the frontal cortex involved in secondary process mentation were inactive during dreaming (Braun, 1999; Hobson and Pace-Schott, 1999). Their conclusion to the effect that the concept of censorship (or defense) is incompatible with these data is based on their assumption that aspects of censorship, such as condensation, displacement, and distortion, represent secondary processes that originate in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

I found myself thinking that a clinical-developmental perspective might be useful in clarifying this apparent discrepancy. I say apparent, because I believe their perception of a discrepancy may reside in the fact that Freud modified his own thinking about defensive operations based on his clinical experience. Thus, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud describes “two psychical forces … one of these forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish … it seems plausible to suppose that the privilege enjoyed by the second agency is that of permitting thoughts to enter consciousness” (p. 144). Later, he modified this idea:

[T]he notion of forcing a way through into consciousness must be kept carefully free from any idea of a change of locality. Again, we may speak of a preconscious thought being repressed or driven out and then taken over by the unconscious. These images, derived from a set of ideas relating to a struggle for a piece of ground, may tempt us to suppose that it is literally true that a mental grouping in one locality has been brought to an end and replaced by a fresh one in another locality. Let us … say instead that some particular me