Retrogression

The notion of retrogression (régrédience) refers to a particular psychic movement and quality. It is clinically inseparable from its result, the work of figurability, whose major manifestation is the dream: these two notions have their place within a theoretical ensemble that aims to account for the coherence of endo-hallucinatory phenomena.

Proposed by César and Sára Botella, this notion is to be clearly distinguished from that of regression, both that of the libido as defined by Freud with the oral, anal and genital stages and that of D.W. Winnicott called “regression to dependence”. Here, it is a matter of regular modes of psychic functioning in its potentiality of expression, and more particularly those that concern thought. Retrogression is thus akin to topographical and formal regression (Freud, 1914a) as well as to that which he calls “material regression” (1917). It proves fundamental for the study of psychic creativity.

Retrogressive psychic functioning is complementary to progressive (“progrédient”) functioning, which extends from the wish to its enactment or representation, while the retrogressive movement extends from the wish to its endo-hallucinatory realisation, figurability.

As a movement and dynamic, retrogression provides a canvas allowing for the formation of figurations and establishes the loom on which ideational contents are deployed. It allows for the linking up of heterogeneous psychic elements, “all the elements present at a given moment, regardless of their origin: representational, perceptual or motor; regardless of their quality: conscious or unconscious; and of their sometimes radical heterogeneity: perception of the sense organs, intrapsychic perception; as well as of their heterochrony: a current thought, a recollection, a repressed childhood wish, a future project. Defined by the simultaneous coexistence of all the components of equal value, of all the psychic elements present at a given moment, retrogression can, in one and the same mov