The Specter of the Primitive

Abstract

Traditional psychoanalytic theories of development hold that the adult neurotic can regress, or has already regressed, to the childhood arrests and/or fixations in which his pathology originated. More recent critiques have called this possibility into question. It is unlikely that anyone can roll back the additions and modifications of lifespan development in a full-fledged return to the needs, wishes, and anxieties of childhood. By regression, though, some analysts mean not a full-fledged return to an earlier developmental phase, but a non-phase-specific slip into primitive fantasies and defenses. The operational term, in this particular variation, is not regression but primitive. The shift from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid position is, for instance, considered not a phase-specific regression but a regression to primitive forms of mentation. The psychoanalytic conception of the primitive originated in Freud's reading of late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Freud and later Klein believed that the neurotic regresses to a psychological childhood, which in turn preserves the thought patterns of our prehistoric ancestors. Although this proposition and the underlying principle of recapitulation have been disproven, its traces are nonetheless preserved in what are termed the primary processes and primitive defenses. A tradition of theoretical critique and developmental research, however, shows that the primary processes and primitive defenses are not in fact primitive. That is, they are neither evolutionarily nor developmentally primary in human life. By implication, psychoanalysis should discard the term primitive and adopt a lifespan approach to the processes it describes.

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational

“…As Stern (1985) notes, even the use of a transitional object depends on representational capacity. Rizzolo (2017) argues against the existence of primitive mental states, insisting that Freud’s “primary” processes and Klein’s “primitive” defenses are neither evolutionarily nor developmentally primitive. He proposes that psychoanalysis discard the concept of primitivity because so-called primitive operations (e.g., hallucinatory wish fulfillment, condensation, splitting, projective identification) are not infantile but rather conceptually sophisticated and thus develop across the life span.…”

Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Situation

“…Freud did not discourage or prevent several early psychoanalysts from adopting his use of lower-order animals and the simplicity of children to analogize and describe people of African descent as primitive, simplistic, and not fully actualized adult human beings (Thomas and Sillen 1972, pp. 7–10; Rizzolo 2017). Specifically, there is the oft-referenced cartoon in Fliegende Blatter showing a lion yawning while muttering, “Twelve o’clock and no negro,” which Freud frequently took to stand for his noon hour patients (Jones 1953, p. 151).…”