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The concept of regression is of paramount importance in psychoanalytic theory: 'The essence of mental disease lies in a return to earlier conditions of affective life and functioning' (Freud). Szasz grapples with the problem of the relationship between emotional stimuli and physiologic (or pathologic) conditions and offers his concept of regressive innervation to explain this relationship. Some of the psychosomatic disturbances (peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, asthma) are the result of such regressive innervation resulting in localized parasympathetic hyperfunction. In such states the organism reacts to an internal stress. By contrast, much of Cannon's work dealt with a conflict between the organism and the outer world, and with the effort to achieve homeostasis by means of adaptations which were currently useful. The human organism, confronted with such stress, attempts to respond with integrative, adaptive behavior mediated by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. If the organism is unsuccessful and homeostasis breaks down, the results have no adaptive utility and are the conditions which Szasz labels 'regressive innervations' (example: defecation in response to great fear). This concept of regression to an earlier phase of development is analogous to Alexander's 'vegetative retreat'. In peptic ulcer, the regressive innervation produces the type of infantile gastrointestinal parasympathetic dominance described by Ivy, with incomplete tetany, frequent contractions, and general hypertonus. Since the parasympathetic division is the oldest (earliest developed) of the autonomic system, regression to that level represents a profound retreat. Szasz notes that adaptative and regressive behavior may coexist physiologically, analogously to what one sees in psychology.
Szasz suggests the use of the term 'concomitant innervation' to describe cases of sympathetic hyperfunction. When such hyperfunction is chronic, it results in