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What makes it desirable to bring to psychoanalysis the latest findings of neurophysiology for a reconsideration of the centuries-old question of how to understand mental functions in the context of those of the central nervous system? Surely, it is not to be expected that members of either discipline have more than an outsider's familiarity with the methods and findings of the other, particularly their aspects at the cutting edge of scientific progress. If interdisciplinary dialogues are to succeed, participants have to take for granted each others' expertise and find those topics within their own discipline that might be answered by putting relevant questions to the other field. This kind of feedback should be feasible at the frontier between neuroscience and psychoanalysis because one of the fundamental aims of each scientific domain is shared: both disciplines seek to understand the regulation of human behavior.
The conclusion of the first century of psychoanalytic work that may be of greatest relevance for a theory of behavior regulation is the realization that a predictable series of regulatory modes succeed each other in the course of ontogenesis (see Gedo and Goldberg, 1973; Gedo, 1979). These modes of behavioral regulation constitute an epigenetic sequence; to put this differently, each mode persists as a potentiality throughout the life cycle and may be called upon whenever it offers the opportunity for optimal adaptation. The various modes have a hierarchical relation to each other—in other words, under most circumstances, the ones consolidated later in the course of development tend to supersede those of earlier origin (see Wilson and Gedo, 1993). The term psychological regression refers to conditions in which predominance