ABSTRACT

Freud postulated that in dreams the excitation travels backward from its usual direction. It usually travels from perception to motor activity, but in dreams it travels backward, toward perception-hence the concept of "topic regression" in dreams. The concept refers to the relationship between the perceptive and motor ends of the mental apparatus. Hence perception and body motion are closer together in the primitive, undeveloped psyche. Somnambulism is often a walking toward the room where the parents have intercourse, which is more akin to hallucinatory satisfaction of infantile wishes than it is to action. In somnambulism, as in acting out, we are not dealing with integrated voluntary action but with an instance of "the horse running away with the rider". Dreams have a propensity for regressive sensory-perceptive reactivation of memory images instead of following the normal channel toward Consciousness and action. Freud proposed three ways of describing the single phenomenon of regression: topographic, temporal, and formal.