Fear and Censorship

Definition: Anxious reaction to perceived danger

Significance: Fear plays an important role in censorship, which is motivated by fear of words, images, or ideas that are viewed as dangerous, and which is reinforced by fear of punishment

The Psychology of Censorship

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, maintained that human beings engage in a form of self-censorship that he termed repression. People have desires, including sexual desires and the desire for power. The early sexual feelings of children, Freud believed, are directed toward those closest to them, their parents. As children learn that some forms of sexuality, especially sexuality with parents, are forbidden, they repress or censor the dangerous feelings from their conscious minds, but they continue to hold their desires unconsciously. Most people can deal with this act of repression with little difficulty, but for some there is a constant, anxiety-producing struggle to push the unacceptable urges out of awareness. The fear of one’s own impulses, especially sexual impulses, can lead to an intense need to stifle the thoughts and expressions related to these impulses.

This Freudian psychological perspective can help to explain why the suppression of sexual expression is such a prominent part of censorship. Sexually explicit materials seem threatening to many people because the materials provoke their own self-forbidden desires. Anthony Comstock, who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1871 and who became America’s most famous antipornography crusader, seems to have been a case study in this type of psychology of censorship. Comstock saw indecency everywhere: in nude statues, in dime novels, and in the poetry of Walt Whitman. He attributed an enormous, evil power to sexuality in art and literature, claiming that Satan used “evil reading” to destroy families and nations.

Comstock displayed an obsessive fascination with the vices he sought to suppress, and he was known to read pornographic materials before destroying them. In June, 1878, he made headlines when he attended a sex show involving three women and sat through the entire show before arresting the women. Most psychologists would maintain that Comstock crusaded against such activities precisely because he was drawn to them, and his fear of pornography was actually a fear of his own sexuality.

Insecurity and the Fear of Freedom

Theories of fear of sexuality can provide insight into why some individuals advocate censorship, but they are not a complete explanation. Sexual expression is not the only target of censorship. Moreover, tolerance for freedom of expression varies at different times and in different places.

The psychologist Erich Fromm argued that authoritarianism, intolerance for freedom, can be produced by insecurity and that times of insecurity tend to produce calls for political control. According to Fromm, individualism is the key characteristic of modern civilization. This means that individuals have the liberty to realize their own natures and their differences from one another. It also means, though, that people may have a sense of isolation from others and of being small and powerless. Liberty therefore poses a threat to people’s identities, since social groups provide human beings with their identities.

When a society undergoes economic and social hardships, people feel especially threatened, in Fromm’s view, and the loneliness of freedom becomes particularly hard to bear. People come to fear freedom, and they feel the need to escape from it and to lose their isolated selves in some greater authority. By providing rules for what can and cannot be said, or even thought, authoritarian governments provide psychological stability based on a strong sense of identification with a group. Those who have escaped from freedom by submerging themselves in a group often see outsiders or people who violate the rules as demons who threaten the foundations of social life.

This group psychology perspective may help to explain why Comstock’s personal obsessions became so influential in post-Civil War America. At the time that Comstock was active (1871-1915), the United States was rapidly changing from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. Immigration was greater than at any other time in American history, and large numbers of new immigrants were arriving from southern and eastern Europe, bringing with them languages and cultures that were strange to earlier settlers. It was in New York, which had become a huge industrial metropolis in the course of a single generation and which was the port of arrival for the greatest number of immigrants, that Comstock founded his society. Support for his crusade against pornographers and morally impure people came from those living in an increasingly complex and unfamiliar environment who wanted to define and safeguard a pure community.

Confidence and Free Speech

Censorship can be seen as a product of fear produced by lack of political self-confidence, as well as a product of psychological insecurities. The principle of free speech is based on the idea that if all individuals express themselves without legal restraint, the community of citizens will be able to weigh all ideas, and to accept the good ones and reject the bad ones. When a nation’s self-confidence is shaken, people may question whether it is safe to let citizens hear, see, and decide for themselves.

The first attempt at legal censorship in the United States, the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, occurred when many in the new country were anxious about the nation’s chances for survival. The United States was caught between warring England and post-revolutionary France. There were Americans who sympathized with each side. France’s revolution had turned extremely violent, and some feared that America might fall into a similar violent upheaval. Many in the Federalist Party of President John Adams believed that the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson contained pro-French subversives. Democratic-Republican criticisms of the Federalist government were seen as weakening the nation to prepare it for a French invasion.

A somewhat similar faltering of national self-confidence stimulated efforts at political censorship during the 1950’s. Americans became concerned over the apparent spread of communism and feared that their own national survival was in danger. As in 1798, many believed that the external threat from alien political and social doctrines was also an internal threat from subversives. Fear of communism and a lack of confidence in American institutions led to the blacklisting of suspected radicals in the movie and television industries. The Smith Act of 1940 which made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, began to be enforced against members of the Communist Party, reflecting a fear that Americans might actually be persuaded by advocates of revolutionary violence.

Bibliography

Eli M. Oboler’s The Fear of the Word: Censorship and Sex (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974) provides a study of the relationship between sexual taboos and censorship. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941) is not specifically about censorship, but it is a classic psychological description of how fear of freedom can lead to political intolerance. Patrick M. Garry’s An American Paradox: Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993) looks at the role of censorship in the American search for national identity. Garry argues that calls for censorship tend to arise when Americans feel anxious and insecure.