![]() ![]() The primary and secondary process, far from being an old-fashioned pair of concepts, reveals to be one of the liveliest and most generative Freudian concepts. (2000, 2002) showed that primary process similarity judgment is based upon a commonality of attributes of the stimulus (elements with the same forms) and Shevrin and colleagues have shown that this is especially the case for linguistic attributes, such as common phoneme sequences (e.g., rebuses, see also Shevrin and Fisher, 1967 Klein Villa et al., 2006). As concerns empirical evidence, in the team of Shevrin (1973), Brakel et al. More recently, Roussillon has qualified the primary process as the locus of the “everything, all at once, all alone, all together, all in one” ( Roussillon, 2007, p. 694), Holt speaks about an association on the basis of “non-essential” features ( Holt, 1967, p. Rapaport proposes that the primary process is characterized by the toleration of contradictions, “omnipotence of thought pars pro toto” ( Rapaport, 1951, p. Other authors after Freud have further elaborated the concept of primary process. It is an ordered and goal-directed thought process – mostly logical, rational, non-hallucinatory, self-correcting and realistic, which can be found in our awake and conscious thinking. 3) secondary process gains in importance and fully develops in the course of life. This “more sophisticated” ( Holt, 2009, p. This process is said to be “attuned to the efficient attainment of goals in reality with the delayed gratification of impulses that is necessary” ( Holt, 2009, p. It therefore allows to disengage from a direct reaction upon the stimulus enabling the organism to have a perspective upon the situation. The secondary process functions to inhibit and control primary process tendencies ( Freud, 1900/1953 Bazan, 2012). ![]() Therefore, it prevails in all different kinds of phenomena which reveal close relationships to unconscious processes, such as neurotic and psychotic symptoms, slips of the tongue and other parapraxes, jokes, transference manifestations, fantasies and free associations, as well as altered states of consciousness, such as sleep, dreams or hypnosis. It prevails in the unconscious, where its manifestations are thought to be hallucinatory, unrealistic, not time-bound, and irrational. Indeed, primary process thinking is characterized by mechanisms of condensation, displacement, substitution, compromise-formation and superficial associations as well as “faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation, representation by the opposite” ( Freud, 1905/1960, p. In the first pages of his “Project for a scientific psychology,” Freud (1895/1950) proposes two founding axes upon which the whole architecture of his mental apparatus is resting, namely the primary and secondary processes – respectively, a horizontal axis as a tendency to associate and a vertical one as the ability for inhibition and perspective taking. Our results support the general idea that REM-sleep is characterized by primary process thinking, while non-REM-sleep mentation follows the rules of the secondary process. However, when the associations were scored on the basis of each subject’s individual norms, there was a rebus effect with more idiosyncratic rebus associations in awakenings after REM than after non-REM-sleep. There were not significantly more rebus associations referring to kampflos indexing primary process mentation when awakened from REM-sleep as compared to non-REM awakenings. ![]() Based on objective association norms, there were significantly more conceptual associations referring to Kamm and Floß indexing secondary process mentation when subjects were awakened from non-REM sleep as compared to REM-awakenings. Upon consecutive awakenings participants were asked for a dream report, free associations and an image description. In a replication of the dream-rebus study of Shevrin and Fisher (1967), a rebus, which consisted of an image of a comb (German: “Kamm”) and an image of a raft (German: “Floß”), resulting in the German rebus word “kampflos” (Engl.: without a struggle), was flashed subliminally (at 1 ms) to 20 participants before going to sleep. Because the solving of a rebus requires the ability to non-contexually condensate the literal reading of single stimuli into a new one, rebus solving is a primary process operation by excellence. The present study tests the hypothesis that the mental activity during REM-sleep has more characteristics of the primary process, while during non-REM-sleep more secondary process operations take place. Primary process mentation is not only supposed to be dominant in the unconscious but also, for example, in dreams. Primary and secondary processes are the foundational axes of the Freudian mental apparatus: one horizontally as a tendency to associate, the primary process, and one vertically as the ability for perspective taking, the secondary process. ![]()
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