The term appeared for the first time in Freud's published work apropos of the "Wolf Man" case (1918b [1914]), but the notion of a sexual memory experienced too early to have been translated into verbal images, and thus liable to return in the form of conversion symptoms or obsessions, was part of his thinking as early as 1896 [as witnessed in his letter of May 30 of that year to Wilhelm Fliess, where he evokes a "surplus of sexuality" that "impedes translation" (1950a, pp. 229–230)].
The following year, in his letter to Fliess of May 2, Freud uses the actual term Urszene for the first time;[1] and gives the approximate age when in his estimation children were liable to "hear things" that they would understand only "subsequently" as six or seven months (SE 1, p. 247).
The case history of the Wolf Man gave Freud the opportunity not only to pursue the issue of the reality of the primal scene, but also to propose the idea that it lay at the root of childhood (and later adult) neurosis: the sexual development of the child was "positively splintered up by it" (1918b [1914), pp. 43–44).
It was not merely, in Freud's view, that the technique of psychoanalysis demanded that fantasies be treated as realities so as to give their evocation all the force they needed, but also that many "real" scenes were not accessible by way of recollection, but solely by way of dreams.
Whether a scene was constructed out of elements observed elsewhere and in a different context (for example, animal coitus transposed to the parents); reconstituted on the basis of clues (such as bloodstained sheets); or indeed observed directly, but at an age when the child still had not the corresponding verbal images at its disposal; did not fundamentally alter the basic facts of the matter: "I intend on this occasion," wrote Freud, "to close the discussion of the reality of the primal scene with a non liquet" (1918b, p. 60).
[3] The sexual relationship between the parents, fantasized as continuous, is also the basis of the "combined-parent figure",[4] mother and father seen as locked in mutual (but excluding) gratification.
Where Klein laid emphasis on the way the infant projected hostile and destructive tendencies onto the primal scene, with the mother pictured therein as just as dangerous for the father as the father is for her, later Kleinians like John Steiner have stressed the creative aspect of the primal scene; and the necessity in analysis of overcoming a splitting of its image between a loving couple on the one hand, and a combined parent figure locked in hate.
Otto Fenichel has stressed the traumatic nature of the excess excitement felt by the child, which they are unable to process — what he called the "overwhelming unknown".
[6] The particularity of the primal scene lies in the fact that the subject experiences in a simultaneous and contradictory way the emergence of the unknown within a familiar world, to which they are bound by vital needs, by expectations of pleasure, and by the self-image that it reflects back to them.
The lack of common measure between the child's emotional and psychosexual experience and the words that could give an account of the primal scene creates a gulf that the sexual theories of childhood attempt to bridge.
Hoyt's Ph.D. dissertation entitled 'The primal scene: A study of fantasy and perception regarding parental sexuality' was submitted to the Yale University.
The conclusion of this study indicated that primal scene experience per se is not necessarily deleterious; the traumatic or pathogenic effects usually occur only within the context of general brutality or disturbed family relations.