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Psychodynamic factors in hypersalivation are deduced by correlating the findings in two psychoanalytic cases and one anamnestic case with other psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic work on hypersalivation. One of the author's patients had a duodenal ulcer and the other had ulcer symptoms. In both there were significant conflicts centering around an unresolved oral attachment to the mother and a regressive competition with younger siblings. Hypersalivation results more from the mobilization of oral-sadistic impulses than oral-receptive ones, whereas in patients with duodenal ulcers the oral-regressive wishes appear as both passive-receptive and aggressive ones. A comparison is made between the oral regression of ulcer patients and the 'adaptive' or 'normal' oral regression of pregnant women in whom hypersalivation is frequent but in whom ulcer is rare. In the ulcer patient the pathological phenomena result from an unsuccessful mastery by the ego of interpersonal conflicts, whereas in pregnant women oral regression is the normal concomitant of internal (physiological) processes and an ego adaptation to 'dependence'.
Szasz suggests and applies a theory of 'regressive innervation' in which sympathetic and parasympathetic fibers supplying an organ system act as a functional unit in contrast to the theory of the total response of the sympathetic-parasympathetic system. In physiological regression the involved fibers return to an earlier form of behavior. In hypersalivation there is a hypertonicity of the fibers supplying the salivary glands—a regression to the degree of function