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Freud formed his theory of the primary process (1900, 1911), the heart of his “metapsychology,” in the conceptual mold of nineteenth-century physics. Despite its historical importance at the birth of psychoanalysis, it remains biologically anachronistic, internally inconsistent, and unable to account for Freud's clinical observations showing that primary process phenomena convey information as well as motivational force. Despite these serious signs of obsolescence, Freud's theory of primary process activity has not been a major topic for scientific discussion in many years.
Since Freud's death in 1939, classical physics has been replaced as the conceptual ideal for biology and psychology by a new theoretical framework drawn from the information sciences. In the life sciences today, generalization and simplification are no longer the primary aims of the investigator. Scientific models constructed within the new framework are designed to capture the richness, complexity, and individuality of biological and psychological phenomena. These models allow practical solutions to problems involving the interaction and mutual regulation of complex systems, from the level of the genetic code to the level of linguistic and problem-solving performance in humans.