Prologue: Primary Process Revisited

In agreeing to edit this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, I sought to locate contributors who would reconsider one of Freud’s foundational innovations, the concept of primary process. Analytic lore, the common or shared knowledge in the field, privileges secondary process, consensually validated “reality,” over primary process, instinctually driven impulses or, following the relational turn, compulsively re-enacted, distorted relational schema. And in this issue, each author, in her or his own way, accomplishes that.

Linda Brakel comes closest to Freud’s initial formulation. Primary and secondary process remain distinct in their mode of operation. Primary process tolerates opposites, contradictions coexist, and reality testing and time contextualizing are suspended. “Primary-process mentation is faster, closer to the drives, affect and impulse-linked” (p. 177). Primary process underlies the clinically key concept of transference, in that “categorizations, too, are associatively constructed” on the basis of “small, superficial, or insignificant features” (p. 177). Within this context, Brakel seeks to provide an interdisciplinary basis for the use of primary process as “a gateway to general understanding of mentation in humans, and in many nonhuman species, as well” (p. 178).

Arising from extensive experience with all aspects of treating schizophrenic patients, Michael Robbins argues that as a result of Freud’s identifying consciousness with reflective symbolic thought, the role of primary process has remained obscure. He proposes that rather than differing in quality from consciousness, primary process represents a developmentally prior, or primordial, form of symbolic thought. He explores the frameworks offered by Freud, Klein, Bion, and Matte-Blanco, arriving at “a model that clarifies that [primary process] is conscious and has cognitive-affective-sensory-perceptual-motor principles of operation that make its presence knowable across a wide spectrum of human phenome