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Freud's conception of human cognition in terms of two fundamentally distinct organizations has been a challenging one since its first presentation in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). Freud himself did not elaborate his theory extensively in the course of his working life. After formulating his notions of the primary and secondary processes in a generally satisfactory way, with particular attention to the primary processes, he turned his attention more fully to the complexities of ideas and wishes organized in primary-process terms which he found to be of major importance in understanding psychopathology.
The further elaboration of the theory itself, however, has been of continuing interest in psychoanalytic psychology. Three interrelated issues stand out as foci of continuing attention. The first concerns the nature of the primary processes as, on one hand, archaic, unmodified by learning, residues of an infantile narcissistic period in which cognition is without relation to reality (e.g., Fenichel, 1945; Jones, 1955; Fliess, 1959), or, on the other hand, as organized, subject to learning, and participating in the highest forms of intellectual activity (e.g., Holt, 1967; Noy, 1969, 1979). The second concerns the distinction between the primary and the secondary processes: specifically, whether they represent two modes of thought, analogous to two languages in which ideas may be expressed, or a single cognitive mode, thought aimed at wish fulfillment, the primary processes its primitive form, the secondary processes its sophisticated one. The third is a developmental issue: the primary processes as the sole cognitive mode in infancy or, alternatively, the presence (perhaps in undifferentiated form) of both the primary and the secondary processes (or precursors of them) from the beginning of life (Rapaport, 1950; Hartmann, 1958; Holt, 1967).