ABSTRACT
Possibly the most famous and yet most controversial explanation of repression is that of the repressing "censor" invoked to account for the repression of desires and wishes independently of the ego's knowing. Nevertheless, Sigmund Freud's account of repression, in terms of disguise and censoring and repressed agencies, is necessarily problematic, since it requires an impossible account of mind. Freud explicitly rejected the concept of multiple knowers, and instead proposed that the "same consciousness turns to one or the other of these groups alternately". Sartre attacks Freud's strategy of explaining repression by partitioning the mind into distinct agents; the repressed desire, the conscious ego, and the "censor". A further problem with postulating a censor to explain repression is that the censor is inferred from the effects to be explained: the censor, used to explain censoring, is itself solely inferred from the act of censoring.
