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My conception of the primary process and its fantasy representation of the psyche—world relation remains more or less faithful to the one that we owe to Freud. That is why I shall confine myself to analysing the factors that radically differentiate its psychical productions from those proper to the primal, stressing more particularly three concepts that the activation of this process forces us to consider: thing-presentation, primary masochism, word-presentation.
The ability of the primary to use word-presentations in its representations is not there from the outset; it appears only in a second stage and gives rise to those cross-bred productions that are the work of what I shall define by the term primary—secondary: an analysis of these will be given in the second part of this chapter.
The activation of the primary is a consequence of the recognition by the psyche of the presence of another body, and therefore of another space, separate from its own. This recognition is not compatible with the postulate of selfprocreation proper to the primal, a self-procreation in which there can be no place for the representation of any separation between procreator and procreated. It is the recognition of the separation between two body spaces and therefore of two psychical spaces, a recognition imposed by the experience of absence and return, that will have to be represented by the representation of a relation linking the separated. This representation is, at one and the same time, a recognition of separation and its negation: the peculiar ity of fantasy production is a representation in which there is certainly a representation of two spaces, but these two spaces remain subject to the omnipotence of the desire for a single one.