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.
Development
1900
Sigmund Freud introduced by
Freud first sketched the distinction in his unpublished Project of 1895; in the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung he names the primary process as the mode of the unconscious system, in which excitation flows freely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.
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud first sketched the distinction in his unpublished Project of 1895; in the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung he names the primary process as the mode of the unconscious system, in which excitation flows freely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.
- 1900 opposed by Secondary process
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.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1915
The longest of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, first printed in two parts in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Freud argues that unconscious mental processes have to be assumed, and separates three senses of the word unconscious: descriptive, dynamic and systematic, the last referring to the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious and the censorships between them. He asks whether feelings can be unconscious, and describes the topography and dynamics of repression in terms of the withdrawal of cathexes and of anticathexis. The system unconscious knows no negation or doubt, is governed by the primary process with its mobile cathexes, is timeless, and replaces external reality with psychical reality. A final section draws on the speech of schizophrenics to distinguish thing-presentations from word-presentations: a conscious presentation includes both, an unconscious one only the thing-presentation.
See also
People
References
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900 Evidence for a relation
- The Unconscious1915 Evidence for a relation