ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how regression and the setting are related in the psychoanalytic process. Regression in the psychoanalytic process was the official theme of the Seventh Latin-American Congress of Psychoanalysis in Bogota in 1969. The Argentinian participants were Avenburg, Madeleine Baranger, Giuliana Smolensky de Dellarossa, Rolla and Zac. The ego psychologists think that the setting was designed by Freud precisely to provoke the patient's regression and so that it can be regulated by the analyst. Leaving aside personal differences that can sometimes become important, all of them think that the setting implies sensory deprivation, emotional frustration, limitation of the object world and infantile atmosphere. Lacan, despite his well-known disagreements with ego psychology, also accepts fully the theory of therapeutic regression. He agrees basically with Macalpine's study, which he thinks is exceptional due to its perspicacity.
