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PARTLY BECAUSE OF DEVELOPMENTS in what is called ego psychology, partly, surprisingly enough, because of the standing accorded to art, some psycho-analysts have in recent years expressed dissatisfaction about the status of the primary process. Formulated on an economic basis with three main mechanisms, condensation, displacement, symbolization, this concept dates from the Project and Interpretation of Dreams(Freud, 1900) but was not elaborated in the light of Freud's many later psycho-analytic concepts, in particular the structural. And so it is now sometimes felt that the primary process was left behind. The complaint, however, does not challenge the main lines for the organisation of unconscious material, dreams in particular, that Freud laid down for the primary process: but the question is asked: what, if anything, happens to the primary process after the full development of secondary process, apart from representations in dreams, pathological states, jokes, verbal errors and art, contexts for which primary process has been invoked continuously. A summary of answers recently made, including, of course, his own, is to be found in Pinchas Noy's extremely able paper, called "A Revision of the Theory of the Primary Process" (Noy, 1950) from which I now quote:
It is obvious that, as the secondary processes are those that are equipped to deal with reality, only the primary ones may serve to maintain the self's sameness and continuity and to integrate new experience with the self. In previous discussion of the function of the primary processes in the preverbal stage, this