Epilogue: Primary Process Revisited

We might summarize Freud’s radical contribution as the recognition, in the words of a recent Nobel Laureate, “something is happening here but you don’t know what it is” (Dylan, 1965, side 1, track 5). The authors and articles in this issue propose variations on that something that can clarify a reader’s thinking while offering a platform for further exploration.

Linda Brakel concludes that psychoanalytic general theory of primary process provides two key contributions, “the key roles of meaningful unconscious processes and that of the a-rational primary processes throughout mental life” (p. 183). In the course of fulfilling a responsibility to support the existence research and for primary process and, as well, for meaningful unconscious mentation, theorists and researchers have expanded their focus to include “empirical investigations, evolutionary considerations, the operation of conditioning, and vexing issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action” (p. 183).

For Michael Robbins, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as a source of energy and content includes the components for “two embryonic mind-models that he was unable to separate sufficiently that each might be elaborated and built upon” (p. 196). Robbins has elaborated the less recognized of these models, primordial consciousness, as “a form of consciousness different from reflective symbolic thought; a mental activity that is ubiquitous in human affairs both normal and pathological” (p. 196). He describes subsequent attempts to separate from Freud by proposing variations on this primordial consciousness, but have succeeded only in reformulating the original concept.

Wilma Bucci concludes her article with a critique of the conventional theory of primary process. The view that primary process reflects only disorganization and a need to be bound or discharged lest it impinge on productive thought reflects fundamental inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory. She notes that even within classica