This article proposes that the primary processes reflect infants' first interactions with the world. Their primitive characteristics depend on the early nonintegration and nondifferentiation of their experiences. Primary process patterns develop in synchrony with the establishment of permanent objects, and become mentalized with them between ages two and five. The result is a mind in which both the impersonal, objective thought modes of the secondary processes and the personal-emotional ones of the mature primary processes are full participants.