Regression is a necessary part of the psychoanalytic process. Various aspects of the analytic situation facilitate regression. In seriously disturbed patients, the regressive movement will inevitably bring into the transference the grave disturbances they have experienced in their early object and part-object relationships. With these patients the basic capacity for dependence necessary for the therapeutic alliance is impaired. They are in great part unaware of their need for a genuinely dependent relationship and they are limited in their capacity to accept or utilize one. For this reason the therapeutic alliance itself becomes the subject of the analytic work.

An excerpt from the early part of an analysis of a patient whose illness was manifested by a severe regression is presented. Despite the severity of the disturbance it was possible to maintain the usual analytic situation with few parameters and to analyze the regressive experience. The regression was understood to be a reliving of the disturbed mother-child relationship.