Censorship

Definition: forbiddance; ban
Antonyms: approval, compliment, encouragement, endorsement, praise, recommendation, sanction
Military History Companion: censorship
Censorship is strictly the review by an authority of any material before publication or dissemination, with the legal right to prevent, alter, or delay its appearance. The term is often loosely used to reflect voluntary arrangements between armed forces and the media, or in criticism of any system other than complete press freedom. Historically, censorship has been habitually practised by most governments, or other political and religious authorities. Censorship in the military sense has only become an issue in modern times, with the growth of liberal or democratic governments, and new methods of press communication. Its problems arise from a collision between traditional press freedoms and the needs of military security in wartime. The USA has occupied a special place in this story, through being the world's first literate democracy, and also through the constitutional position of the press. Much censorship has been by co-operation, and it has not been unusual for the media to ask for guidance or even direct censorship from the armed forces, rather than reveal wartime secrets.

The profession of war correspondent developed in the mid-19th century with the growth of the telegraph and widespread newspaper readership. The first wars on which reporting probably had a direct impact were the Crimean and the American civil wars. In the next fifty years vague censorship regulations were established in most western countries, but only supplementing more important informal arrangements. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war convinced the British in particular that a more formal system was needed.

At the start of WW I all belligerents had extensive censorship legislation and practices, although military attempts to exclude the press altogether from reporting the fighting fronts proved unsuccessful. This war also saw the extension of censorship to servicemen's letters home. Comments in letters analysed by censors became a tool for commanders in judging their own side's morale. WW II saw a revival of similar censorship practices, again with significant co-operation from the press. But this only applied chiefly to wars of national survival, and to the era of newspaper dominance. The last significant case of legally enforceable wartime censorship by the USA or Britain was the Korean war.

The rise of radio and television to supplant newspapers in the second half of the 20th century raised a number of new issues. Controversial but highly critical claims that the unrestricted reporting of American involvement in the Vietnam war had contributed to defeat produced concern on all sides. The result was the introduction by the USA and Britain of voluntary systems of press restraint, seen in the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Since then, developments in media communications technology have made censorship increasingly unfeasible.
US Supreme Court: Censorship
The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint-any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).

The Court first directly addressed the constitutionality of prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931). In question was a Minnesota law that allowed judges to eliminate as a public nuisance any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” newspaper or periodical (see Libel). A state court had declared a newspaper, the Saturday Press, to be a public nuisance after it had attacked public officials with allegations of corruption, laziness, and illicit contact with gangsters. Much of the material seemed anti‐Semitic. The state court issued an order forever prohibiting the editors “from producing, editing, publishing, circulating, having in their possession, selling or giving away any publication whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper” either under the title of the Saturday Press or any other title (p. 706). Violation of the order would constitute contempt of court.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court found the statute to be an unconstitutional form of censorship, because before a banned newspaper could publish again, the editors would have to satisfy a judge as to the new publication's good character. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the majority concluded that prior restraint would be constitutional only in extreme circumstances, for example, if a newspaper were about to publish the location of troops in wartime. Speaking for dissenters, Justice Pierce Butler protested that the Minnesota law did not constitute a classic form of censorship because the newspaper had published nine issues before being suppressed. He noted that the law “does not authorize administrative control in advance such as was formerly exercised by the licensers and censors” (p. 735).

In subsequent cases, the Court disapproved of administrative licensing of speech where the licenser can make decisions based on the context of the would‐be speaker's expression. For example, in Lovell v. Griffin (1938) the Court held unconstitutional an ordinance banning distribution of literature without permission of the city manager, where the manager had carte blanche to grant or deny permits. Likewise, the Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1951) found unconstitutional a New York scheme under which exhibition licenses could be denied to motion pictures found to be “sacrilegious.” Nor would the Court allow the postmaster general to revoke Esquire magazine's second‐class mailing privileges on grounds that the publication was not contributing sufficiently to the public good and welfare (Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 1946). The Court struck down injunctions prohibiting newspapers from publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that had been leaked to the press (New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971). And it held that judges could not prohibit journalists from publishing material potentially prejudicial to a criminal defendant when such material was obtained in open court (Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 1976).

On the other hand, the Court is likely to allow licensing systems that minimize administrative discretion, regulate the time, place, and manner of expression without regard to its content, and are guided by clear and specific standards (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 1953). The Court has allowed government censorship of obscene movies, but only if stringent procedures are followed, including prompt judicial review (Freedman v. Maryland, 1965). The Court has also granted public elementary and secondary schools broad power to censor student publications (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). It has also concluded that the federal government has broad power to require many government employees to submit to censorship of their speech and writing even after they leave government employment and even when unclassified material is involved (Snepp v. United States, 1980). Further, the Court has held that people who disobey court orders restraining expression may be punished for contempt even if the restriction is likely to be found unconstitutional (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967).

The Near decision itself has been invoked to justify prior restraint, which has led critics to complain that the Court has provided no clear theory or standards for determining when prior restraint is permissible. In the Pentagon Papers Case, justices on both sides of the decision used Near to support their positions-some for the proposition that prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional, but others for the proposition that exceptional circumstances can justify prior restraint. And when, in 1979, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting The Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to explain how to build a hydrogen bomb, the judge concluded that the article was analogous to the types of exceptional circumstances listed in Near (United States v. The Progressive). (The injunction was lifted after similar material was published elsewhere and the government dropped the case.)

In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.

The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: censorship

Act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good. In the past, most governments believed it their duty to regulate the morals of their people; only with the rise in the status of the individual and individual rights did censorship come to seem objectionable. Censorship may be preemptive (preventing the publication or broadcast of undesirable information) or punitive (punishing those who publish or broadcast offending material). In Europe, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches practiced censorship, as did the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Authoritarian governments such as those in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union have employed pervasive censorship, which is generally opposed by underground movements engaged in the circulation of samizdat literature. In the U.S. in the 20th century, censorship focused largely on works of fiction deemed guilty of obscenity (e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover), though periodic acts of political censorship also occurred (e.g., the effort to purge school textbooks of possible left-wing content in the 1950s). In the late 20th century, some called for censorship of so-called hate speech, language deemed threatening (or sometimes merely offensive) to various subsections of the population. Censorship in the U.S. is usually opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Germany after World War II it became a crime to deny the Holocaust or to publish pro-Nazi publications. See also Pentagon Papers.
Russian History Encyclopedia: Censorship
Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm's first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) expanded his government's monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia's first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newlycreated Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741 - 1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.
When Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing "free publishing" banned published words against "the laws of God and the state" or of a "clearly-seditious" nature. The police would henceforth supervise "free" presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine's reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.
Sharing Catherine II's early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801 - 1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia's first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon's invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.
At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825 - 1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.
Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to "direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government." No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).
Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of "Literature, Science, and Art" (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod's right - through censors chosen from ecclesiastical academies - to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.
Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter clandestine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything "inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects." One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas - so-called "Official Nationality" - to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.
With respect to the state's granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.
Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors' approval under Nicholas I.
Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881) blamed that debacle on Russia's backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.
On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give "relief and convenience to the national press." Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a "dangerous orientation." Freed from censorship - but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow - were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute's subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.
In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would "take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions." During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.
That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881 - 1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just "dangerous" periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889 - a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen's Deputies ordered members of the Printers' Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.
Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted "one of the fundamental freedoms." Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.
Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.
War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: "Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia." Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in 1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
Enforcing limits on the printed word - and all cultural and artistic expression - was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956 - 1964) as first secretary, and his effort to "de-Stalinize" the USSR brought his famous but short-lived "thaw" in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost.
Columbia Encyclopedia: censorship,
official prohibition or restriction of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order. It may be imposed by governmental authority, local or national, by a religious body, or occasionally by a powerful private group. It may be applied to the mails, speech, the press, the theater, dance, art, literature, photography, the cinema, radio, television, or computer networks. Censorship may be either preventive or punitive, according to whether it is exercised before or after the expression has been made public. In use since antiquity, the practice has been particularly thoroughgoing under autocratic and heavily centralized governments, from the Roman Empire to the totalitarian states of the 20th cent.
In the United States
Censorship has existed in the United States since colonial times; its emphasis has gradually shifted from the political to the sexual.
Political Censorship
Attempts to suppress political freedom of the press in the American colonies were recurrent; one victory against censorship was the trial of John Peter Zenger. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, speech, and religion. Nevertheless, there have been examples of official political censorship, notably in the actions taken under the Sedition Act of 1798 (see Alien and Sedition Acts), suppression of abolitionist literature in the antebellum South, and local attempts in the 19th and 20th cent. to repress publications considered radical. During the cold war many Americans worked to keep textbooks and teaching that they considered deleterious to “the American form of government” out of schools and colleges; many others opposed this effort (see academic freedom).
The issue of government secrecy was dealt with in the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which stated that, with some exceptions, people have the right of access to government records. The issue was challenged in 1971, when a secret government study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers was published by major newspapers. The government sued to stop publication, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers (see press, freedom of the).
Cultural Censorship
Long before World War I there were vigilante attacks, such as those by Anthony Comstock, on what was reckoned obscene literature, and the U.S. Post Office expanded (1873) its ban on the shipment of obscene literature and art, but it was after World War I that public controversy over censorship raged most fiercely. Until the Tariff Act was amended in 1930, many literary classics were not allowed entry into the United States on grounds of obscenity. Even after the act's amendment censorship attempts persisted, and James Joyce's Ulysses was not allowed into the country until 1933, after a court fight. Noted works of literature involved in obscenity cases included Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1957, a series of Supreme Court decisions relaxed restrictions on so-called obscene materials, although not all obscenity prosecutions during this time were dismissed; in a famous case in the 1960s publisher Ralph Ginzburg was convicted of advertising in an obscene manner.
As Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statutes, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting the sale of obscene materials to minors, and these were upheld (1968) by the Supreme Court. In decisions handed down in 1973 and 1987, the Court ruled that local governments could restrict works if they were without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and were at the same time seen, by local standards, to appeal to prurient interest. From the 1960s, the issue of sex education in schools was highly controversial; more recently, the question of AIDS education has stirred debate. In the 1980s, some feminists attempted to ban pornography as injurious to women. Other activists, concerned with racism and other forms of bigotry, lobbied for the suppression of what came to be called hate speech.
The producers of motion pictures, dependent for success on widespread public approval, somewhat reluctantly adopted a self-regulatory code of morals in the 1920s (see Hays, Will H.). This was replaced after 1966 by a voluntary rating system under the supervision of the Motion Picture Producers Association; the need to tailor a movie to fit a ratings category has acted as a form of censorship.
Since 1934, local radio (and later, television) stations have operated under licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission, which is expressly forbidden to exercise censorship. However, the required periodical review of a station's license invites indirect censorship. The Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that indecent material could be banned from commercial cable-television stations but not from public-access cable stations.
The rapid growth of the Internet presents another set of issues. The Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton, was overturned by the Supreme Court for the restrictions it placed on adult access to and use of constitutionally protected material and communication on the Internet. The Children's Internet Protection Act (2001), which requires libraries and schools to install antipornography filters on computers with federally financed Internet access, was upheld, however, because it was only a condition attached to the acceptance of federal funding and not a general prohibition on access.
In Other Countries
In other countries, censorship is accepted as inevitable in times of war, and it has been imposed to varying degrees even in peacetime. In the Middle Ages, attempts to silence heresy through intimidation, particularly through the establishment of the Inquisition, were examples of censorship, as are modern instances of book banning. The absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cent. imposed strict controls, and because the Reformation had resulted in a reshuffling of the relations between church and state, these controls were used to persecute opponents of the established religion of a particular state, Roman Catholic or Protestant. A form of book-banning was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the Index, a list of publications that the faithful were forbidden to read. The last edition of the Index was published in 1948; in 1966 Pope Paul VI decreed that it would be discontinued. Paradoxically, in the lands under Calvinist domination (such as Geneva, Scotland, and England of the Puritan period) where the ideals of liberty and freedom first blossomed, regulation of private conduct and individual opinion was rigorous, and censorship was strong.
Strict censorship of all forms of public expression characterized the Soviet Union throughout most of its 74-year history. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, was not permitted publication there, and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, considered by many to be masterpieces, were banned in 1966. Soviet censorship ended in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness).
In Britain during the 19th and 20th cent., the object of censorship has most often been literature regarded as obscene. With the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, there followed many criminal prosecutions and seizures of books. This law remained in effect until 1959, when a new law provided that the opinion of artistic or literary experts could be submitted as evidence in deciding obscenity cases and that work alleged to be obscene had to be judged as a whole rather than in part. However, when the editors of an underground periodical, Oz, were convicted in 1971 for violating postal laws, an appeal court held that a periodical need not be judged as a whole, an apparent reversal of the 1959 act.
Psychoanalysis: Censorship
The term censorship in everyday language connotes ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: "we are very often astonished," he writes, "to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (1895b, p. 281-282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he compares this psychic work to the censorship that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time: "Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).
Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain. Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).
The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the "antechamber") and on to the conscious (the "drawing-room") (1915e).
Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from repression: whereas repression rejects a representation and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example: "We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed" (1916-17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under the superego-the merciless supervisor (1923b).
Although the notion of censorship continues to be fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.
History 1450-1789: Censorship
Censorship began in the sixteenth century as the effort to prohibit religious ideas that were deemed heretical. From the beginning religious censorship was only possible when civil governments agreed that it was needed and provided the police authority for enforcement. In the following two centuries the state gradually took complete control, with little or no participation by clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed and waned according to the perceived threat of alleged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest during the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant states sought to enforce religious uniformity, and weakest during the antireligious and politically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech, and theater never completely disappeared because almost all state and church authorities felt that it was a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the populace from destructive ideas.


The Protestant Reformation
Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not permit overt political criticism within the state, but they could do little about denunciations from beyond their borders. Because there was widespread agreement about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, little censorship of religious and philosophical ideas existed.
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation stimulated the beginning of religious censorship. Since Protestants promulgated their views through the printing press, and Catholics replied via the same medium, it was inevitable that both sides would try to control the press. But they waited until all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the sixteenth century before establishing censorship machinery. Then both sides developed similar policies.
Press censorship needed three components to be effective. First, an individual or a group had to determine which books, authors, and ideas were dangerous-a commission of experts had to prepare a list of objectionable previously published books. Second, prepublication censorship was needed to ensure that new books propagating heretical, seditious, or immoral ideas would not be published. Governments had to establish committees of readers, composed of clergymen and civil officials, to review manuscripts before issuing permissions to print. Prepublication censorship would become the most widespread and effective kind of censorship. Third, the civil authority used its police powers to keep banned books from entering the state and, if possible, to remove them from bookstores and libraries. This part of censorship was never very effective.
The papacy fulfilled the first requirement by promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books, the most important of which were the Tridentine Index of 1564, so called because the Council of Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clementine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clement VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide those carrying out prepublication censorship and expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and church authorities cooperated relatively effectively in censorship actions despite numerous disagreements and jurisdictional conflicts. For example, France never accepted the papal indexes but still banned Protestant books and ideas.
Protestant censorship followed the same paths except that no supranational Protestant church existed to direct and coordinate censorship. Since Protestant religious leaders invested the state with substantial authority over the church, the state assumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protestant state had to decide which books to ban and how to censor. Protestant states banned the publication, importation, and ownership of Catholic works, and sometimes the works of other Protestants. They also condemned books considered immoral and critical of the government. Although Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Geneva had the most effective Protestant censorship in the sixteenth century.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches and states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and taught in universities. Prepublication censors sometimes dictated that scholars accept unwelcome changes in their works. Authors exercised some degree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Catholic and Protestant worlds lost university positions, or suffered worse, because of their religious views. Political censorship also intensified in the late sixteenth century as governments attempted to stem a flood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially in France.
State Censorship
Although censorship began as a result of the religious division of Europe, civil governments quickly took complete control of censorship of books and theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the 1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors existed. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to read manuscripts intended for publication and to grant the publisher the right to print the book, called a privilège. By the eighteenth century the number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200. The college exercised prepublication censorship and awarded exclusive publication rights to one publisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.
English censorship of printed works began when Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547) sought to protect the national church from other doctrines and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding monarchs used censorship to enforce different religious establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553) allowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled 1553-1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) passed numerous laws censoring the press and the theater to ensure that they respected her version of the English Church, did not publish Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy. In 1557 the crown created the Stationers' Company to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every book had to be licensed helped control the press. English monarchs continued a policy of state censorship over the next two centuries, although the purpose of censorship increasingly became that of shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Nevertheless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism produced considerable variation from regime to regime in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and blasphemous matter simply published without permission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-publication censorship of written materials. The practice of locating and destroying books and prosecuting publishers had always been difficult, and that also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.
Every other large and small political unit had similar censorship systems, sometimes including representatives of the local church. But the local nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and printers wishing to publish political or religious criticism only needed to go to the next state to publish their works. Then the international commercial network of the book trade, including book fairs at Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late seventeenth century created a new publication that was difficult to censor. Because newspapers were local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick and local. The censorship machinery of the sixteenth century was organized to censor learned works of religion, philosophy, and politics and could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broadsides and other ephemeral matter, which were printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the names of author and printer, and were quickly distributed.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, especially in the years from 1750 to 1789, significantly weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially religious censorship, partly because they wrote many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786), Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740-1780) and Joseph II (Holy Roman emperor, 1765-1790; king of Austria, 1780-1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762-1796), and King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759-1788), who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more religious and literary freedom of expression. However, when writers began to publish works criticizing absolutist government and demanding expanded political rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened censorship. But they did not, and could not, return censorship to its earlier state.
In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously weakened the privilège system, as censors permitted the publication of ideas that had previously been banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just beyond the borders of France published many works without privilèges, then sent them into France. The loosening of censorship permitted an avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the monarchy and the church, which helped bring on the French Revolution.