Berne discusses and illustrates certain images, judgments, and intuitive processes in adults that are the conscious representations of unconscious images and judgment based on relationships in the presymbolic period of very early childhood. The images have a special intensity, like eidetic images, and are a reaction to certain archaic unconscious attitudes of other people. In schizophrenics and neurotics these images have not undergone normal modification and resolution. In normal people they have been decathected and mastered and come into consciousness as intuition. They are activated in personal relations and are related to the formation of basic judgments concerning other persons.

The paper is essentially a discussion of secondary repression, the return of the repressed, and the primary process operating in certain instances.