of undoubted traumatic potentiality are wanting—as is generally the case with neurosis—there the mechanism of regression prevails. Of course, you could object that we have no criterion for the potential effect of the trauma or shock, as this is a highly relative conception. It is not quite so; we have in the standard of the average normal a criterion for the potential effect of a shock. Whatever is capable of making a strong and persistent impression upon a normal person must be considered as having a determining influence for neurotics also. But we may not straightway attribute any importance, even in neurosis, to impressions which in a normal case would disappear and be forgotten. In most of the cases where any event has an unexpected traumatic influence, we shall find in all probability a regression, that is to say, a secondary phantastic dramatization. The earlier in childhood an impression is said to have arisen, the more suspicious is its reality. Animals and primitive people have not that readiness in reproducing memories from a single impression which we find among civilized people. Very young children have by no means that impressionability which we find in older children. A certain higher development of the mental faculties is a necessary condition for impressionability. Therefore we may agree that the earlier a patient places some significant event in his childhood, the more likely it will be a phantastic and regressive one. Important impressions are only to be expected from later youth. At any rate, we have generally to attribute to the events of earliest childhood, that is, from the fifth year backwards, but a regressive importance. Sometimes the regression does play an overwhelming part in later years, but even then one must not ascribe too little importance to accidental experiences. It is well known that, in the later course of a neurosis, the accidental events and the regression together form a vicious circle. The withdrawal from the experiences of life leads to regression, and the regression aggravates the resistances towards life.
In the conception of regression psychoanalysis has made one of the most important discoveries which have been made in this sphere. Not only has the earlier exposition of the genesis of neurosis been already subverted, or at least widely modified, but, at the same time, the actual conflict has received its proper valuation.
