Perhaps we shall not find it too rash an assumption that the excitations proceeding from the instincts do not conform to the type of the ‘bound’ but of the free-moving nerve processes that are striving for discharge. The most trustworthy knowledge we have of these processes comes from the study of dreams. There we found that the processes in the unconscious systems are fundamentally different from those in the (pre)conscious; that in the unconscious ‘charges’ may easily be completely transferred, displaced or condensed, while if this happened with preconscious material only defective results would be obtained. This is the reason for the well-known peculiarities of the manifest dream, after the preconscious residues of the day before have undergone elaboration according to the laws of the unconscious. I termed this kind of process in the unconscious the psychic ‘primary process’ in contradistinction to the secondary process valid in our normal waking life. Since the excitations of instincts all affect the unconscious systems, it is scarcely an innovation to say that they follow the lines of the primary process, and little more so to identify the psychic primary process with the freely mobile charge, the secondary process with changes in Breuer’s bound or tonic charge.[15] It would then be the task of the higher layers of the psychic apparatus to bind the instinct-excitation that reaches the primary process. The failure to effect this binding would evoke a disturbance analogous to the traumatic neuroses; it is only after the binding had been successfully accomplished that the pleasure-principle (and its modification the reality-principle) would have an opportunity to assert its sway without hindrance. Till then, the other task of the psychic apparatus would take precedence, viz. to obtain control of or to bind the excitation, not in opposition to the pleasure-principle but independently of it and in part without regard to it.