Concept
Regression
A return to an earlier form of mental functioning: to earlier ways of thinking, to an earlier stage of libidinal development or to earlier kinds of relation to others. Freud used it from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) on, for the backward path of the dream towards perception and for the fall-back of the libido to old fixation points in neurosis; Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott later treated regression within the analysis as something that can also serve the treatment.
Development
1900
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud introduced regression in chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for the dream's backward movement through the psychical apparatus towards perception; he later spoke also of temporal and formal regression, among them the libido's return to earlier fixation points.
In The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967)
1968
reworked by Michael Balint
Taking Ferenczi's technical experiments further, Balint treats regression in the analysis not only as resistance but as a state the analyst must know how to meet, and one that, in its benign form, can open the way to a new beginning. Thrills and Regressions (1959) and The Basic Fault, subtitled Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (1968), are given to it.
In The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (1968);Thrills and Regressions (1959)
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud introduced regression in chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for the dream's backward movement through the psychical apparatus towards perception; he later spoke also of temporal and formal regression, among them the libido's return to earlier fixation points.
- 1968 reworked by Michael Balint
Taking Ferenczi's technical experiments further, Balint treats regression in the analysis not only as resistance but as a state the analyst must know how to meet, and one that, in its benign form, can open the way to a new beginning. Thrills and Regressions (1959) and The Basic Fault, subtitled Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (1968), are given to it.
Works
- 1959
Thrills and Regressions (1959), Michael Balint's third book, begins with an everyday pleasure: the excitement people seek on funfair swings, switchbacks and roundabouts, and in risky sports. From it Balint builds a theory of the earliest object relations and of regression in analysis. He defines a thrill by three elements. There is awareness of a real external danger, a deliberate exposure to it, and a confident hope that it can be survived and that one will return safely. People respond to such situations in opposite ways, and from this Balint derives two basic attitudes, for which he coined the terms ocnophilia and philobatism. For the ocnophil, objects are safe and the spaces between them are horrid and empty. The ocnophil clings to objects, needs to be near them, feels anxious on leaving them and is ambivalent towards them. For the philobat, open spaces are friendly expanses and objects are unpredictable hazards. The philobat relies on their own skills and keeps a distance from objects. Balint follows the two attitudes through aggressivity and auto-erotism, love and hate, and reality testing, and into people's relation to ideas. He argues that each attitude rests on an illusion. To explain why both persist, he posits an earlier state of primary love. This is a harmonious mix-up of the individual and the environment, in which there are no separate objects yet, and it is more like a world of substances such as water or air than of bounded things. It may even be a prenatal state. Inevitable frustrations and separations destroy this harmony, and firm objects emerge. Ocnophilia and philobatism then appear as two secondary reactions to that trauma. Here Balint revises his own earlier view: clinging to the analyst is no longer an expression of primary love but a defence against the fear of being dropped. The second part of the book turns these ideas on the analytic situation, and also reads flying dreams and Bertram Lewin's dream screen in their terms. Balint describes patients who must get up from the couch, and others who only slowly learn to close their eyes and turn inward. The analyst, he argues, should become part of a friendly environment for the regressed patient rather than a demanding object. He criticises the theory and technique of his time as biased towards ocnophilia. Interpreting everything as transference makes the analyst an object that is always offered to be clung to. The patient may then introject an idealised analyst in place of the old internal objects and acquire an "efficient shell" that equips them for life but narrows what they can feel. An appendix gathers short notes on related themes, and a chapter by Enid Balint, "Distance in Space and Time", completes the book. The book stands between Balint's earlier papers on primary object-love and The Basic Fault (1968). There he placed the basic fault between primary love and the two attitudes, and drew the distinction between benign and malignant regression.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
- 1968
The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression
Michael Balint's book, published in London in 1968, distils four decades of clinical work into an account of why some analyses stall and what the analyst can do when they do. It begins from an observation: with certain patients, at certain moments, interpretations stop working as interpretations. They are heard as attacks or seductions, or do not register at all; the analyst's most casual words and gestures take on enormous weight; and a patient who is not understood does not become angry but sinks into emptiness and futility. For Balint these are signs that the work has left the level on which Freud's technique was built. Part I sets out three areas of the mind. The Oedipal area is triangular, organised by conflicts that interpretation can resolve, and conducted in ordinary adult language. The area of the basic fault is strictly two-person; what operates there is not a conflict but a deficiency, a fault in the geological sense of a structural flaw, and conventional words are unreliable in it. It originates in a marked lack of fit, in the earliest phases, between the infant's needs and the care and affection available. The area of creation contains no external object, only 'pre-objects'; it is the place of artistic and scientific creation, of insight, and of the first phases of falling ill and of spontaneous recovery, and its processes cannot be hurried from outside. Part II replaces Freud's primary narcissism, which Balint finds contradictory and unproductive, with primary love: an original relationship to an undifferentiated environment, a harmonious interpenetrating mix-up comparable to our relation to the air, in which the environment is simply taken for granted. Objects with firm contours, and with them narcissism, hate, ocnophilia and philobatism, emerge only once this harmony is disturbed. Adult love tries to restore it through the work of turning an indifferent object into a cooperative partner. Part III describes the gulf between the analyst and the 'child in the patient', and the problem of language: every analytic school teaches its patients its own idiom. Balint weighs three responses to regression. Classical technique keeps the work at the Oedipal level and so depends on careful selection of patients. Consistent, confident interpretation, associated with the Kleinian school, teaches the patient the analyst's language at the price of an inequality between an all-knowing analyst and a weak patient. The management of regression, associated with Winnicott, risks an unending spiral of demands. The cautionary case is Ferenczi's late 'grand experiment', which Balint watched at close range, in which Ferenczi tried to meet one patient's every need. Part IV, the heart of the book, distinguishes two forms of therapeutic regression. Benign regression aims at recognition: the patient needs an environment that tacitly consents to be used, a trusting, unsuspecting ('arglos') atmosphere forms, and the regression ends in a 'new beginning', the discovery of freer ways of relating. Malignant regression aims at gratification through the analyst's action: trust repeatedly breaks down, desperate clinging appears, and ever-renewed demands of suspicious intensity drift towards addiction-like states; Balint links it with severe hysteria. Because regression happens inside a relationship, its form depends on the analyst's response as well as on the patient. Balint reads the Freud–Ferenczi disagreement through this distinction: Freud generalised from malignant cases, Ferenczi from benign ones. Part V draws the technical consequences. At the level of the basic fault the analyst should avoid becoming a mighty, knowing, omnipotent object, whether through incessant transference interpretation, through gratification, or through promises to see the patient through. The analyst should let the patient use them as a primary substance is used, the way water carries a swimmer, and should provide time and a quiet setting in which the patient can find a personal way to objects. During the regression interpretation is used sparingly and acting-out is accepted as communication, to be worked through once the patient is back at the Oedipal level. The fault itself cannot be analysed away: at best it heals with a scar, and a successful treatment includes mourning for the original defect.
See also
People
References
- The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression1968Evidence for a relation
- Thrills and Regressions1959Evidence for a relation
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967Evidence for a relation