Nearly 85 years ago Freud formulated his conceptions of the primary and secondary processes in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895). Since then these concepts have had their vicissitudes, particularly with respect to judgment about how scientific they are. Most analysts nevertheless continue to rely on them to describe varieties of mental activity. Only recently Loewald (1978) restated what has often been said, that these concepts are generally considered to be among the most fundamental in psychoanalytic theory. My goal here is to recontextualize Freud's model of mental activity in a way that harmonizes with contemporary cybernetic perspectives, a transformation which can be effected by treating the primary and