When a child acts up, seems excessively emotional, or has less self-control than usual, you'll sometimes hear people describe these events as "regression" to an earlier stage of development. It may even be said that a child is intellectually of a certain age, but emotionally much younger.
Is this possible? Does it make any sense to attribute problem behavior to regression?
The idea of regression dates back over a hundred years, to the work of the British physician John Hughlings Jackson. At a time when it was far from clear whether there were differences between mental disorders caused by physical disease, and those caused in some other way, Hughlings Jackson studied patients with epilepsy. He established a rule about nervous system damage, stating that injury to high-level, late-maturing parts of the brain would bring back functions of lower-level areas that had matured earlier-- so the patient would "regress", or go backward, along the same lines he or she had followed in the original path of development.
Not many years later, Sigmund Freud adopted the idea of regression as a way to explain his patients' emotional or uncontrolled behaviors and moods. He suggested that in the course of development a person may become "fixated" at a stage, and find it difficult to continue to mature properly; regression is a process that helps the person to address that stage and move on from it. Some of Freud's followers, such as Sandor Ferenczi, stressed regression as a useful part of psychotherapy, but also felt that it was possible to encourage regression by behaving in parental or nurturing ways to patients, even holding their hands or cuddling them. (This, of course, would be prohibited in any modern form of conventional psychotherapy.)
Following World War II, regression was often discussed as part of the treatment for adults and children who had been traumatized during the war. John Bowlby, the developer of attachment theory, commented optimistically on treatments that encouraged regression by caring for children as if they were infants. Similarly, Bruno Bettelheim proposed to treat autistic children by feeding them with bottles and providing lavish amounts of candy and other treats. These practices were apparently based on the idea that if people could be caused to regress in their development, they could then be guided to recapitulate or repeat the steps of early development and to emerge as mature beings.
Regression was taken so seriously that research (e.g., by T.X. Barber) was done on people who were "hypnotically regressed" to see whether their behavior was really appropriate for the age they were supposed to be. In fact, it was not really appropriate-- but it was the behavior the participants were convinced was appropriate for particular ages. Nevertheless, the encouragement of regression remained part of some systems of psychotherapy, especially in Britain, where "famous names" like Donald Winnicott and Michael Balint considered regression an important part of their methods. In the 1970s, R.D. Laing encouraged regression as part of his attempts to treat serious mental illnesses. Transactional Analysis in the United States involved similar attitudes.
Today, psychoanalysts may still use the regression concept as it was suggested by Freud, but are most unlikely to use "reparenting" techniques. Cognitive-behavioral psychologists are unlikely to use the concept at all. However, unconventional treatments such as Attachment Therapy may still employ what they call "age regression" methods, rocking, bottle-feeding, and diapering older children in an effort to send them back to early developmental stages, although in 2006 the American Professional Society on Abuse of Children decried such practices.
Evidence-based psychotherapy practices no longer assume that it is possible for a child or adult to regress to an earlier stage, that such regression would have therapeutic effects, or that it is possible for a therapist to make regression happen. In developmental psychology, the term "regression" has taken on a different meaning, and is usually used to describe spontaneous changes that are seen in the process of development. For example, as language development proceeds, children usually begin by learning irregular verbs ("ran" instead of the regular-verb-like "runned"), and later "correct" themselves by applying the rules for regular verbs ("runned"). In this case, making more mistakes-- regression--- is actually an indication of developmental progress. Similarly, many descriptions of children's behavior have shown that periods of improved self-control are usually followed by periods of less self-control, with overall gradual change toward a more adult-like level. These periods of less self-control or greater emotionality are sometimes referred to as "regression", even though each of them is part of a broader pattern of progress.
It really doesn't make much sense to say that children who are upset are "regressing". Their behavior may resemble that common to younger children, but it's also like that of children their own age who are under too much stress. As for the idea that a child can be very young emotionally and older intellectually, it would be much more reasonable to say that he or she has the language and information we expect, but is lacking in self-regulation, or easily frightened, or clingy, or whatever the problem is. A 10-year-old may show inappropriate behavior, but is not the same emotionally as an ordinary three-year-old, or as the three-year-old he or she once was.
Using the term "regression" makes it much too easy to make some wrong assumptions about individuals and about treatment of emotional problems. Better to use a few more words and say what we really mean!
