a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

former. This displacement of emphasis is a favorite device of the dream
distortion and gives the dream that strangeness which makes the dreamer
himself unwilling to recognize it as his own production.
Omission, modification, regrouping of the material, these, then, are the
effects of the dream censor and the devices of dream distortion. The dream
censorship itself is the author, or one of the authors, of the dream distortion
whose investigation now occupies us. Modification and rearrangement we are
already accustomed to summarize as displacement.
After these remarks concerning the effects of the dream censor, let us now
turn to their dynamics. I hope you will not consider the expression too
anthropomorphically, and picture the dream censor as a severe little manikin
who lives in a little brain chamber and there performs his duties; nor should
you attempt to localize him too much, to think of a brain center from which
his censoring influence emanates, and which would cease with the injury or
extirpation of this center. For the present, the term "dream censor" is no
more than a very convenient phrase for a dynamic relationship. This phrase
does not prevent us from asking by what tendencies such influence is exerted
and upon which tendencies it works; nor will we be surprised to discover that
we have already encountered the dream censor before, perhaps without
recognizing him.
For such was actually the case. You will remember that we had a surprising
experience when we began to apply our technique of free association. We
then began to feel that some sort of a resistance blocked our efforts to
proceed from the dream element to the unconscious element for which the
former is the substitute. This resistance, we said, may be of varying strength,
enormous at one time, quite negligible at another. In the latter case we need
cross only a few intermediate steps in our work of interpretation. But when
the resistance is strong, then we must go through a long chain of
associations, are taken far afield and must overcome all the difficulties which
present themselves as critical objections to the association technique. What
we met with in the work of interpretation, we must now bring into the dream
work as the dream censor. The resistance to interpretation is nothing but the
objectivation of the dream censor. The latter proves to us that the force of
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