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Although Freud revealed the unconscious thanks to his associative capacities and brilliant intuitions, one should not underestimate the fact that he owed his discovery to the study of dreams and especially to the study of his own dreams. Analytic research, psychical work and the atemporality of the unconscious can only be approached or grasped by means of a particular state of thinking that proceeds along the backward, retrogressive path.
In Freud's work, topical, temporal and formal regression ‘are one at bottom and occur together as a rule; for what is older in time is also more primitive in form and in psychical topography lies nearer to the perceptual end’ (Freud, 1900: S. E. V, 548). We have opted for the preferential use of the term formal regression in order to stress the fact that regression concerns a change of quality, a change in the form of psychic elements – the model being the transformation of the ideas into a hallucinatory dream image. Freud writes:
This regression, then, is undoubtedly one of the psychological characteristics of the process of dreaming; but we must remember that it does not occur only in dreams. Intentional recollection and other constituent processes of our normal thinking involve a retrogressive movement … In the waking state, however, this backward movement never extends beyond the mnemic images; it does not succeed in producing a hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images.
During waking life, ‘it is necessary to bring regression to a halt before it becomes complete, so that it does not proceed beyond the mnemic image’ (S. E. V, 566). Freud means that without the break of the ‘perceptual images’, without the intervention of memory, the mind could very well regress, in daytime, to a ‘primitive state’ of its functioning, which would result in hallucinations.