First Day

Following a brief welcome by Rose Edgcumbe, the meeting opened with a paper by the first chairman, Dr Harold Blum.

II. Blum: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, friends. It is a great pleasure to be back here in the domain of Freud. Coming here always feels to me like a return to home base. I am going to introduce today's topic of progression and regression in child and adult psychoanalysis with a brief digression. I have decided to bisect the topic, because, even though progressive and regressive tendencies are always present in analysis (and real life), progression is really different in so many ways. For the purposes of this morning's introduction, I will largely confine my remarks to regression. I shall examine it as a ubiquitous psychic phenomenon, as a pathogenic agent and as part of normal development. I shall trace a line of development from Freud through Anna Freud, mentioning some of the major contributors along the way.

As we know, regression can be pathological or normal, beneficial or harmful, benign or malignant, transient or permanent, reversible or irreversible, controlled or uncontrolled, and it is usually partial and differentiated, affecting certain functions. Regression tends to be uneven, rather than smooth and global. Freud, as he developed the concept, leaned very heavily - certainly at first - on the contributions in the late 1880s of Herbert Spencer and Hughlings Jackson. Spencer, who was very much influenced by Darwin, as were Jackson and Freud, paid attention particularly to the role of what he called ‘retrogression’ and which eventually was termed ‘dissolution’, as the opposite of evolution, on a biological level. He noted the tendency, as the brain and central nervous system developed, towards greater degrees of differentiation, specialization and complexity, and he indicated that a retrogression could occur, in the opposite direction, towards de-differentiation, less specialization, greater degrees of immaturity. This was associated with