Humankind is characterized by its world openness. Unlike many other kinds of mammals, human beings lack any definite, clear-cut markers by which we can identify the nebulous notion human nature. We lack the clear instinctual patterns found among most other species--instead we have evolved to a condition of becoming in our growth and development critically dependent upon the acquisition and mediation of culture by which to complete and bring to maturation our character. Culture becomes by definition those external forces and factors which impinge upon our innermost being from the very beginning, and which become internalized in place of instinct, to the point that they become as if primary nature. We cannot therefore speak of a pure human nature totally unadulterated by the influence of cultural conditioning. We only have to study the few extant cases of feral children and children raised under conditions of severe cultural deprivation to witness the helplessness and lack of order of pristine human nature. But we can speak of humankind having evolved an inherent, naturally based capacity for culture--indeed a need and even a drive for cultural acquisition, one which makes all children so curious and interesting in the world. We can also speak of human-made, externally based cultural elements becoming internalized as if they are natural, to the point that our language, our appetites and aversions, our sexual preferences and practices, our values, attitudes, beliefs, our feelings and our daily behaviors, take on a force of habit that has almost the strength and the same power of control as if fully developed instinct.

With the possibility of internalization of cultural character as if human nature, comes the reverse possibility of the externalization of bits and pieces of human nature--needs, drives, emotions, behaviors--as if a humanly constructed part of the cultural world. The child not only internalizes the life and life-world of the parents, but in the process extends its own organic being into this effective environment to make it intrinsically an extension of its own being.

The process of internalization is characterized by what has been called subjective inevitability and is part of another process referred to as primary acquisition, primary socialization and primary enculturation and, from a psycho-social standpoint, primary identification. These are different dimensions of the same phenomena. What characterizes all of them, besides the sense of subjective inevitability, is that they involve a process of deep embedding of behavior and thought, to a point beyond the influence of mere habit or acquired patterns of behavior, to the extent that they become a relatively permanent and subsequently unmodified part of basic human character. Though fixed, they are not so complete as instinct would have it.

We can call this entire phenomena primary process and speak of humans having learned things so well that it becomes more than second nature if something just less that first nature. It is upon the deep seated level of primary process that we must seek explanations for many social and behavioral phenomena, and solutions to many difficult and intransigent human problems.

The point of primary process is that culturally derived characterized are ingrained to the point of organic being, of even perceptual experience in framing and modify how we relate to the world we inhabit. At this level, people with different backgrounds may indeed experience, even see, the world differently than others.

The principle of primary process explains a cycle of culture and personality development that can be claimed to have largely taken the place of natural evolution for humankind. We are no longer constrained by natural selective forces, but have instead substituted an alternative kind of developmental patterning in which there is a critical feedback between, on one hand, the externalized world of culture and the internalized world of human nature, and, on the other, the level of primary process and the subsequent level of secondary social process.

As we internalize into our own character cultural based traits, to the point that these become part of our primary being, we in turn subsequently externalize into our cultural life-worlds that primary being, to the point of critically influencing its direction of development. As our characters become, with increasing age, increasingly fixed upon the level of primary process, secondary process increasingly takes over in subsequent influence upon our character.

The difference between primary and secondary processes are roughly the difference between primary and secondary language acquisition. They do not differ in kind or quality except that the former is characterized by an inherent capacity or facility, almost a imperative, while the latter is notably lacking in such a capacity. The primary level is the level at which things are acquired organically, automatically and reflexively. Secondary level things are acquired by force of habit and conditioning, but the effect is far more ephemeral and far less complete than for primary conditioning. The energy threshold for secondary acquisition is much higher and less surmountable than for primary acquisition.

It can be said that humans are genetically program to some as yet unknown extent for primary acquisition during critical stages of early childhood.

Primary acquisition, having been deeply embedded, takes on an unmarked and largely subconscious influence. It comes to constitute the background of culture and personality out of which secondary process later reconfigure human character. Primary acquisition is largely unadulterated and does not compete with previously acquired traits, except perhaps at the level of genetic capacities. Secondary acquisition must largely compete with and take over space of primary acquisition.

The unmarked condition of primary process is important because it goes on at a level which remains largely out of awareness. A large amount of nonverbal communication can be said to occur at the level of primary process, in an unmarked way. Remaining out of awareness, it is largely beyond the normal purview of our conscious control. It remain largely taken for granted, implicit, unquestioned.

Cultural constraint, at the level of primary process, is largely the kind of indirect constraint which constitutes the cumulatively decisive cultural context for the conditioning of human personality and character. Primary process comes to control us. We rarely have the opportunity to control our own innermost character.

It is most likely that subsequent external influence on the level of primary process is likely to have critically disruptive effects, the source of events or episodes or crises upon personality and social identity. Attempts to alter and modify primary process of the adult personality are likely to be met with a great deal of subconscious and indirect resistance, negative reaction, and even failure, and may have expectedly yet largely unpredictable end-results. This is true whether we are a well-intentioned Psychiatrist trying to cure a patient of her/his child repressions, or a well-meaning Professor attempting to alter the behavior and character of one of her/his prime students in a more professionally suitable manner.

It is at this level that we can experience,and account for culture shock, and the problem of crossing wide gulfs or strong cultural boundaries which separate different peoples in time and space. The resistance and frustration we are likely to feel as an alien in an alien environment, will most importantly be upon the level of primary process.

It is important to also recognize that our crossing of boundaries in life, our passages, must be mediated in one way or another by the critical presence/absence of a significant other. In early stages of development, this is known as bonding. Later we refer to it as identification, reference, friendship, modeling, and mediation or brokerage.

Basic cultural differences are to be found to exist mostly upon the level of primary process. Upon this level different cultures are pervasive and nearly total in the daily lives of its constituency.

It becomes vital that if we are to understand the influence of culture upon character, and the influence of human nature upon culture, then we must seek answers and evidence upon the level of primary process. From a cross-cultural standpoint, we can see the great difference whether we raise, in different cultural milieus, children to be independent or interdependent, sociable or authoritarian, dominant-dependent or nurturant, responsible or socio-pathic, passive or aggressive, introverted or extroverted, open or closed-minded, honest or deceitful, orally dependent or phallic, taciturn or talkative, inbound or cosmopolitan, conservative or liberal, tolerant or intolerant, hierarchical or egalitarian, physical, emotional or cerebral, sympathetic or apathetic, violent or peaceful, sexually repressed or sexually liberated, ego-centric or socio-centric.

It is important to recognize the multi-factorial structure of the influences and factors which impinge upon the development of primary process, many of which are beyond human awareness or control. We must critically examine the long-lasting impact that wide-spread day-care may have in critically altering the cultural character of its youngest generation. We must reexamine the case of single parent households, early childhood separation, foster parentage and adoption, the cases of aberrant or deviant socialization. We must look at the deep intransigence of cultural ingrained patterns to change or influence, as well as the long lasting influence larger historical and social events can have upon subsequent generations of a culture. We must look at the case of cultural inferiority complexes when a minority group is subjugated and repressed by a majority group, and the effect this must have upon the development of subsequent generations at the level of primary process. We must examine the influence which a pervasive and omnipresent electronic media may have at this level, whether intentional or not.

We must see primary process for what it is, as something paradoxically both beyond our control and yet remaining within the purview of our power and our patience. It controls us while we try to change it.

It is by primary process that we can account for a large substantive part of those anthropological relativisms which have plagued the social sciences since their inception. Cultures caught upon different historical trajectories have developed and come to transmit primary process in fundamentally unique ways.

Part of the uniqueness of this primary process is that it is a multi-factorial kind of thing, probably not accounted for by any single or even minimal set of determinative factors. The kinds of historical and social factors that input into it and the resulting characteriological and cultural patternings are not simply predictable or even commensurate.

This leads us to ask a central and important question, of what exactly is primary process, and how does it occur. An important component of this must be the organic program of early child growth and development, and the many environmental factors which either enrich or stifle this growth and development. The young child grows into the mold fashioned by the workings of the cultural environment that person grows up in. As the child grows into this environment, extending itself in a ever enlarging circle of the larger social self, the child also steadily incorporates much of this environment into itself, such that it forms the basic templates from which all subsequent maps and models will be derived, or compared or contrasted.

This process is stimulated from within with almost no natural or built in resistance. There is a natural drive, an cultural imperative, for acquisition which will prompt a child normally deprived to explore and seek the nourishment it needs to grow with. A child seeks a continuous challenge with life, at all stages and levels of sophistication and difficulty. The challenges that children meet on a daily basis, and which often defeat them, are obstacles that adults take for granted. Adults have successfully met these obstacles and have incorporated them at a level of autonomic reflex that they do not even notice them anymore in the same way that the same things may become the center of the child's complete absorption.

What significance does the notion of primary process hold for evolutionary theory of humankind. First we may say that the primary mechanism driving human evolutionary development must have been the development of this mechanism, and the unique set of circumstances allowing for this development, which made possible to externalization of human nature in the form of culture and which also made possible the internalization of a rudimentary cultural environment.

We cannot ignore the long period of childhood socialization and infant dependency, and the strong bonding between mother and child--an extended period which may, in terms of primary process, never really ended, and one which rendered the human being an unrehabilitated and socially dependent creature--dependent upon the group for more than just satiation of hunger or sexual drives, but to meet other symbolic, linguistic and affective needs. These social needs have long remained without any necessary organic basis in human survival and yet with many important organic associations and effects. It rendered humankind vulnerable to the condition of the group--subject to its ostracism and control, even to the point of its physiological well-being. It rendered humankind continually anxious and capable of being easily subdued and subjugated to the demands of the group. Symbolic forms took on a vital life within the context of the group which had a strong impact upon the being. It meant a permanent loss of innocence, and the beginning of a never ending quest for independence.

It follows that if we are to institute social reforms which will be effective in inducing social responsibility as well as greater social equality, we will have to do so mostly upon the level of primary process, and it will be at this level that our most problematic resistance to reform will be met.