ABSTRACT
Freud had inferred that remains fixated at an unconscious primary process level dominated by the Pleasure Principle. Tb account for the differences in the fate of infantile sexuality, he proposed a distinction between two types of frustrating experiences during infancy and childhood: mild to moderate, or "optimal frustrations", which lead to the transformation of infantile sexuality into secondary process, and overly intense, or "traumatic frustrations", that produce repression of and fixation on infantile sexuality. There is a realm of thinking between primary process-Pleasure Principle thinking and secondary process-Reality Principle thinking: the realm of daydreaming, in which the wish and its fulfillment are one and the same. The tremendous narcissistic investment people make in their secondary process thinking contributes to the blind spot. How much and at what times in a child's development trauma occurs vary a great deal. Trauma is a psychoeconomic concept in psychoanalysis, referring not to the content of an experience but to its amount and intensity.
