Concept
Primary process
The mode of functioning of the unconscious system, in which psychical energy flows freely and seeks immediate discharge, so that ideas are readily condensed, displaced and substituted for one another, without regard to contradiction, time or external reality. Freud described it in the seventh chapter of Die Traumdeutung (1900) to account for the dream-work, and set it against the secondary process; it answers to the pleasure principle.
Read more- Broader concept
- Topographical model
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Secondary process
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1900 Freud first sketched the distinction in his unpublished Project of 1895; in the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung he names the primary process as the mode of the unconscious system, in which excitation flows freely towards discharge by condensation and displacement, as seen in the dream-work.
opposed by
- Secondary process 1900 The two processes are defined against each other: in the primary process energy is free and seeks immediate discharge by the shortest path, by way of condensation and displacement; in the secondary process it is bound, discharge is postponed, and thinking can test the paths to satisfaction against reality.