ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop Freud's systematic distinction and its implications for repression. Passive accounts of "repression" also follow from the perceived connection between the development of language and symbolic thinking. A major implication of the claim that language is necessary for consciousness is that since all preverbal experience is incapable of consciousness, all preverbal experience necessarily falls victim to primal repression. It is clear in the context of concurrent psycho-analytic psychology that the development of the system preconscious and of the secondary process is intimately associated with verbal mnemic symbols. Freud's systematic account, premised on the notion of qualitatively distinct types of systems and processes, cannot be coherently sustained. The general problem is that the supposed peculiarities said to be exclusive to one system can be found across the others. Freud's systematic distinction should be rejected on the basis that qualitatively distinct processes have not been shown to exist, a point particularly conspicuous in Freud's own account.
