A certain mother habitually rewards her young son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Come to love or hate ice cream, or c. Come to love or hate mother? (Bateson, 1972, p. xvii)

Primary Process

"The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive."

Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric. These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free association.

It is also true that the subject matter of primary-process discourse is different from the subject matter of language and consciousness. Consciousness talks about things or persons and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned. In primary process the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is on the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them. This is really only another way of saying that the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. A metaphor retains unchanged the relationship which it "illustrates" while substituting other things or persons for the relata. In a simile, the fact that a metaphor is being used is marked by the insertion of the words "as if" or "like." In primary process (as in art) there are no markers to indicate to the conscious mind that the message material is metaphoric.

(For a schizophrenic, it is a major step toward a more conventional sanity when he can frame his schizophrenic utterances or the comments of his voices in an "as if" terminology.)
(pp. 139-140)

To talk in "word salad" within the psychological frame of therapy is, in a sense, not pathological. Indeed the neurotic is specifically encouraged to do precisely this, narrating his dreams and free associations so that patient and therapist may achieve an understanding of this material. By the process of interpretation, the neurotic is driven to insert an "as if" clause into the productions of his primary process thinking, which productions had previously deprecated or repressed. He must learn that fantasy contains truth.

For the schizophrenic the problem is somewhat different. His error is in treating the metaphors of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. Through the discovery of what these metaphors stand for he must discover that they are only metaphors.
(p. 192)