Primary and secondary processes

Primary and secondary processes name two contrasting but interacting modes of psychical activity. The primary process presses toward discharge and the revival of a wished-for perception; the secondary process inhibits that immediate course, organizes thought, and directs energy toward changing the external world. The distinction gives an account of why dream and symptom formation can depart from ordinary reasoning, and why such departures are not simply intellectual mistakes: they arise when excitation is no longer governed by the secondary process.

A model of wishing and satisfaction

The account begins with a hypothetical primitive psychical apparatus organized to avoid accumulating excitation and to remain as free of it as possible. Its first available route of discharge is movement, understood on the model of a reflex apparatus. An experience of satisfaction leaves a memory; when need returns, rising excitation is felt as unpleasure and sets the apparatus in motion toward restoring satisfaction. This current, from unpleasure toward pleasure, is called a wish. The first form of wishing may be a hallucinatory reinvestment of the memory of satisfaction, but hallucinating the desired object cannot actually end the need.

That failure makes a second activity necessary. Rather than letting the memory-charge proceed to perception and consume psychical force without meeting the need, this activity diverts excitation through a longer route: voluntary movement alters the external world so that the desired object can be perceived and satisfaction can occur. The two activities are treated as the beginnings of the systems later described as the Unconscious and the Preconscious. The distinction is therefore functional as well as structural: one mode tends toward immediate discharge, while the other delays and redirects excitation in the service of effective action.

Inhibition and the two processes

The first system is directed toward freely discharging quantities of excitation. The second inhibits that discharge by adding its own energy-charge, making the excitation quiescent; after its exploratory work of thought is complete, it can suspend this inhibition and allow discharge through movement. The precise mechanics are acknowledged as unknown, though the account proposes that an analogy with physical processes and neuronal excitation might help make them conceivable.

This inhibition also bears on unpleasure. The secondary system can charge an idea only if it can inhibit the unpleasure that would arise from it. If the inhibition fails, the idea is inaccessible to that system and, under the unpleasure principle, is promptly dropped. Yet inhibition need not be absolute: an initial degree of unpleasure can serve as a signal about the memory and its suitability for the thinking process. This arrangement makes inhibition more than a brake; it is a condition under which certain ideas can be considered at all.

The name primary process is given to the psychical activity permitted by the first system alone. The process resulting from the inhibition imposed by the second system is called the secondary process. The primary process aims to discharge excitation and establish perceptual identity; the secondary process gives up that aim in favor of thought-identity. Thinking takes an indirect route from the memory of satisfaction toward an equivalent charge of that memory, expected to be regained through motor experience. It must follow the connecting paths between ideas without being led astray by their intensities.

Thought, distortion, and control

Condensations, intermediary formations, and compromises obstruct the secondary process’s pursuit of identity: by substituting one idea for another, they pull thought away from the route that would lead back to the intended memory. Secondary thinking therefore avoids these formations as far as it can. It must also limit the unpleasure principle’s influence, allowing affect to develop only to the minimum degree that can function as a signal. Consciousness is supposed to mediate this finer regulation, but the control is rarely complete; even ordinary thinking remains vulnerable to distortion when unpleasure interferes.

The contrast also clarifies the relation between unconscious wishes and repression. In the account of psychoneurotic symptoms, an infantile unconscious wish transfers its force to preconscious thoughts. If the wishful excitation becomes strong while those thoughts have lost their preconscious charge, they are left to the primary process. Their course then tends toward motor discharge or, if possible, the hallucinatory revival of the desired perceptual identity. A defensive struggle may follow when such thoughts press through despite the Preconscious’s opposition; compromise formations can emerge as symptoms. The account thus links the return of irrational processes to a specific imbalance: ideas deserted by preconscious energy can be taken over by the uninhibited excitation of the Unconscious.

Dreams and everyday evidence

Dream interpretation supplies concrete examples of psychical activity departing from ordinary control. In a dream of Irma’s examination, the dreamer’s annoyance at Otto’s report that Irma was better but not fully recovered, together with the clinical history written that evening, remained active during sleep. The dream transformed those concerns into a scene of examination and infection, including a conspicuous formula for trimethylamine and the suggestion that Otto’s syringe had not been clean. Such a dream is not presented as a deliberate, rational argument: its images and associations make visible the workings of excitation and wish under conditions different from waking thought.

The handling of speech in dreams offers another example. Dream-work does not create speech from nothing: analysis traces dream utterances to fragments heard or spoken in waking life, cut from their contexts, broken apart, selectively retained, and recombined. An apparently coherent speech may resolve into several separate fragments; wording can be given a meaning different from the one it held in its original setting. In an example drawn from a patient’s market dream, the butcher’s phrase that something was no longer available came from an earlier explanation that childhood experiences were no longer directly available in analysis, but returned through transferences and dreams. A separate phrase in the dream, which the patient had used in a quarrel with her cook, displaced a more significant reprimand that had been left out. The dream’s speech is thus evidence of how material is transformed rather than freely invented.

The smallest details of the dream’s wording matter for the same reason. In recounting a dream, waking thought can distort it through secondary revision, and the remembered or narrated version may not preserve the manifest dream exactly. But those changes are not arbitrary: they remain associatively connected to the material they replace, and they too are determined by psychical processes. The processes described as primary and secondary therefore extend beyond the initial formation of a dream to the way it is recalled and put into words.

The theory’s reach and limits

The proposed distinction makes irrational formations intelligible as modes of activity rather than mere errors. Primary processes appear wherever ideas, deprived of their preconscious charge, are invested with the Unconscious’s uninhibited energy and push toward discharge. Related displacements and confusions can occur when preconscious ideas are connected to words, even though such effects are ordinarily associated with inattention. When primary modes of thought force their way into consciousness, the extra work normally required to inhibit them may itself become perceptible as comic effect and laughter.

The theory is presented with a limit as well as a claim. Freud carries over to dreams a proposition developed from the theory of hysteria: that abnormal treatment of a normal train of thought occurs when a repressed unconscious wish originating in infancy is transferred onto it. He also admits that the assumption that every dream-motivating wish originates in the Unconscious cannot be proved universally, although it cannot be disproved. At this point the broader theory remains unfinished. Primary and secondary processes provide a framework for explaining how wishes, inhibition, thought, and distortion interact, while leaving open how far the account can be demonstrated in every dream.