Primitive Mentality*

Psychoanalytic literature has abundantly emphasized the part played by phantasy in the neuroses and the psychoses and I have taken occasion to emphasize that phantasying is a way of thinking quite different from our usual way, in fact that we think in two quite different ways;1 first, the usual way with which we are quite familiar. In this method of thinking there is clear consciousness in the sense that the person is definitely oriented toward reality and the thinking is carried on with the exercise of critique and under the control of the processes we term intellectual. Such clear, conscious, intelligent thinking has its motivating incentives in reality. Second, the other kind of thinking which is very different and which takes place without conscious direction or critique, the thinking in which ideas follow one another without selection, coming and going without apparent reason and not corresponding with any relation between the individual and reality. This is the kind of thinking that takes place during dreaming, either in sleep or in day dreaming, at times of mental abstraction, and the thoughts that come at such times are not controlled by intellectual critique but by feeling, in fact they are not thoughts in the usual sense, we call them phantasies and the process phantasying.

Another property of this phantasying is that it is less developed, more primitive and infantile in character than intellectual thinking and because of this fact and the further fact that it is characteristic of the neuroses and psychoses I undertook in my paper “Psychoanalytic Parallels”2 to draw certain parallels between it and the thinking of children and of primitive man.

A still further implication of these facts is that if one method of thinking is relatively primitive and the other relatively developed