Concept
Secondary process
The mode of functioning of the preconscious and conscious systems, and later of the ego, in which energy is bound and discharge is postponed, allowing attention, judgement, reasoning and controlled action. Freud set it against the primary process in Die Traumdeutung (1900) and tied it to the reality principle in 1911: thinking becomes a trial action carried out with small quantities of energy before the subject acts in the world.
Development
1900
Sigmund Freud introduced by
In the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung Freud sets a second, inhibiting process of the preconscious system against the primary process: excitation is bound, discharge is delayed, and thought can explore paths to satisfaction. In 1911 he tied it to the reality principle.
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung Freud sets a second, inhibiting process of the preconscious system against the primary process: excitation is bound, discharge is delayed, and thought can explore paths to satisfaction. In 1911 he tied it to the reality principle.
- 1900 opposes Primary 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.
- 1911
Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning
Freud's short paper of 1911 sets out how the mind comes to take account of the external world. It starts from the observation that every neurosis estranges the patient from some part of reality. The older, primary processes, which survive in the unconscious, obey the pleasure principle: they strive for pleasure, draw back from unpleasure, and at first satisfy a need by hallucinating its object. Only when the expected satisfaction fails to come is the mental apparatus forced to represent real circumstances and seek real change, and so the reality principle is installed. The paper lists the adaptations this brings: attention, a system of notation that forms part of memory, judgement in place of repression, motor discharge turned into action, and thinking as experimental acting that allows discharge to be delayed. Phantasying splits off and stays under the pleasure principle. The sexual drives, kept autoerotic and then halted by latency, are educated to reality later than the ego drives, which lays down a disposition to neurosis. The paper then treats religion, science, education and art as different settlements between the two principles, and ties the choice of neurosis to the phase at which development was inhibited. It closes by warning that in the unconscious, thought-reality counts as external reality, so the analyst must reckon in 'neurotic currency'.
- 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
- Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning1911 Evidence for a relation
- The Unconscious1915 Evidence for a relation