Chapter 19. Freud and the Idea of Regression

It can easily be proved that the idea of regression is as old as, if not older than, psychoanalysis. This might surprise some people who know that ‘regression’ appeared in print for the first time in the last, theoretical, chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

This was a modest first appearance. Freud needed it to explain the hallucinatory nature of dreams, which differentiates them from remembering. He assumed a normal or ‘progressive’ direction of processes in the adult mind, starting with the perception of a stimulus and going first towards thought and then to action, which then aims at reducing the tension caused by the stimulus. If action is impossible, or proves inadequate, a backward, retrogressive or ‘regressive’ movement may take place which, in normal waking life, goes only as far as the memory traces. A regression beyond this point towards reviving the perceptual elements of experience, i.e. towards hallucination, is one of the psychological characteristics of dreaming.

This, as I have said, was a modest first appearance. It introduced regression as a minor mechanism of defence, much less important than repression. To illustrate this difference, regression is discussed only once, towards the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, and its role does not amount to more than a temporary measure against a repressed urge or wish, that is, to a minor contribution to the dream work. However, the idea of regression at that time already had a past, and was to have a future. To anticipate something of the latter, I would like to mention that Anna Freud (1936) ranked regression first in her enumeration of the defence mechanisms, while repression came only second.

As regards its past, it is difficult to give an exact date for its inception, but it seems probable that it was stimulated by Freud's contact with Brücke or Breuer. Breuer, in the theoretical chapter of Studies on Hysteria (1895, p. 189) used the adjective rückläufig (retrogressive) to describe th