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The relationship between primary process and formal thought disorder is conceptually obscure in the psychoanalytic literature. My intent is to briefly review the history of the terms primary process and formal thought disorder, posit two principles of linkage between the terms, and discuss their grounding in the object relations, both actual and fantasied, of the individual.
The concept of “primary process” was first mentioned by Sigmund Freud in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” originally written in 1895, but not published until 1954. It first appeared in publication in the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1955, p. 601), embedded in the dynamic and economic concepts of 19th century science:
I propose to describe the psychical process of which the first unconscious system alone admits as the “primary process,” and the process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second preconscious system as the “secondary process.”
He went on to specify the fundamentally energic, rather than structural, basis of the primary process, “not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge” (Freud, 1955, p. 610).