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compromises, are constructed by way of condensation. The reality bound logical laws of thinking – the secondary process and its language symbolism – do not apply for the primary process. Above all this applies to the law of contradictions. Contradictory ideas exist side by side without abolishing each other. They may combine in ways that would never be tolerated by conscious thought. Finally, in primary process, ideas transfer their intensities to each other, standing in “the loosest mutual relations ” (ibid. p. 596). While Freud started by ascribing to the censorship the decisive role in the irrational processes of the unconscious, he ended up by according the primary process a commanding place alongside the logical thoughts of consciousness. The irrational processes, he writes, “are the primary ones. They appear wherever ideas are abandoned by the preconscious cathexis [investment], are left to themselves and can become charged with the uninhibited energy from the unconscious which is striving to find an outlet” (ibid. p. 605). Thus, the primary process is a mode of functioning in psychic life freed from the inhibitions of conscious thinking. Primary process should be understood as an organizing principle existing in normal adult life as an alternative to the dominant logical and verbal organized secondary processes with its communicative language symbolism. One important characteristic of primary process is tolerance of ambiguity and of contradiction. Another is its hallucinatory, wish-fulfilling guise, as a perceptual act in the present (Freud, 1912a). Thus understood, primary process is a cognitive process, which differs substantially from the definition of cognition in cognitive psychology. It was however, in his metapsychological texts that Freud (1915 a, b, c) systematized the concept of the unconscious in its economic, dynamic and topographic assumptions. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (Freud, 1915a), the instincts are defined as a border concept between the physical and the mental realms. In “Repression” (Freud, 1915b) , Freud distinguishes between primal repression , which is “the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance to the consciousness” (Freud, 1915b, p. 148), and ‘ repression proper’ , the ‘ after-pressure ’. In “The Unconscious” (1915c), the topographic theory finds its zenith. Freud begins by reviewing the concept of a dynamic unconscious , one that exerts counterforce to the act of repression. He goes on to establish the existence of the unconscious through its derivatives: parapraxes, symptoms and dreams, and demonstrates that feeling, thinking, remembering and doing are mostly under the influence of unconscious derivatives as well. Freud makes a distinction between latent acts, which are temporarily and only descriptively unconscious , but which can become conscious by connecting with a word, and repressed processes and contents, which are permanently unconscious, and which are dynamically kept out of consciousness (corresponding to dynamic unconscious ). There is no ‘either - or’ in the unconscious; the primary process and its features – telescoping, displacement and condensation – apply equally to the unconscious as they did previously to the ‘dream process’ fifteen years earlier. Freud postulates the presence of two censorships, one between the systems Ucs and Pcs that, in certain circumstances, may be circumvented and a second censorship between the systems Pcs and Cs. Emotions, feelings and affects are excluded from the Ucs. An affect is said to have been ‘unconscious’ only after the connection between the repressed idea and the emotion is restored.
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