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… Can you imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering, losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again? And they walked erect with increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or other running on toes or fingertips, and quite unable to recover the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realized more keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the “stubborn beast flesh.” They were reverting and reverting very rapidly.
H. W. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
The concept of regression is one of the most fundamental explanatory constructs in psychoanalytic theory. Arlow and Brenner (1964) provide a good historical overview of how Freud's ideas on regression grew out of his two earliest and deepest interests, biology and neurology. Freud was greatly influenced by the ideas of biological atavism and retrogression of morphological structures current in late nineteenth century evolutionary theory, and it is not surprising that the neurological-evolutionary theories of Hughlings Jackson held a special attraction for him. Jackson applied the doctrine of evolutionary levels to different pathological forms, such as illusions, hallucinations, and delusions, and theorized that these phenomena were occasioned by a process of dissolution of