ABSTRACT
This chapter explains 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. To understand the theory of therapeutic regression of ego psychology, the chapter focuses mainly on two factors: first, Hartmann's concept of secondary autonomy; second, the function of the setting. The analytic atmosphere puts the analysand's entire psychological structure into a state of tension, and from this a regressive process results. 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.
