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This paper is the continuation of the author's efforts to collate the psychoanalytic theory of memory1 and a forecast of his attempt to collate the psychoanalytic theory of thinking in his recent volume, Organization and Pathology of Thought.2 These contributions attempt to integrate psychoanalytic metapsychology and the general theory of thought processes with clinical and academic psychological evidence and theory.
The present paper discusses both the id psychology and the ego psychology of thought processes, sketching the conditions under which the instinct representation—the hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the idea—becomes thought, experimental action. The presentation centers on the concepts of 'delay of discharge' and 'detour from the direct path toward gratification', the former being the indispensable condition, and the latter the salient characteristic of the secondary process (goal-directed) thought in contrast to the primary process (wish-fulfilling) ideation. The economic problem of the development of thought is treated in relation to the metapsychology of repression, and the problems involved in the binding (neutralizing) of mobile id cathexes are sketched.
The paper also deals briefly with the relation of thought to action and affect, and presents a sketch of Freud's conception of consciousness and attention.
One of the useful features of this paper is that the sixty-three-item bibliography indicates not only the sources but also the specific pages on which the author has drawn. Except for I. Hermann's contributions, the present paper, and the author's above-mentioned other contributions, are the only papers in psychoanalytic literature which treat explicitly of the theory of thinking. The present paper is also the only one extant which presents systematically the theoretical ideas Freud expressed in Chapter VII of his The Interpretation of Dreams, and in his papers, On the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Repression, and The Unconscious.
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