This paper emphasizes the importance of primary processes in considering developmental theory. It examines hallucinatory wish fulfillment, mirroring, holding and the Oedipal resolution as part of continually re-enacted cycles from birth to death. Primary process undermines any notion that we can ever attain an `end-point' in human development, a notion implicit in developmental accounts. By extension, it undermines utopian visions of political progress. Case material from research with female university students and from a female client in therapy illustrates and extends psychoanalytic understandings of the limitations on human satisfaction and the impossibility of judging what is in someone's best interests, including our own.
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