Someone please clarify this for me

[bilsch01]

In Symbols of Transformation (wandlungen) para. 25 Jung quotes Freud:

Freud finds that the hallmark of waking thought is progression: the
advance of the thought stimulus from the systems of inner or outer
perception through the endopsychic work of association to its motor end,
i.e., innervation. In dreams he finds the reverse: regression of the
thought stimulus from the pre-conscious or unconscious sphere to the
perceptual system, which gives the dream its peculiar atmosphere of
sensuous clarity, rising at times to almost hallucinatory vividness.
Dream-thinking thus regresses back to the raw material of memory. As
Freud says: “In regression the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved
into its raw material.”

1) Is this an example of progression:
a hot potato is dropped in my lap (stimulus from outer system)
and my hand flips it away (innervation).

2) can someone provide a similar example for what he says about
regression? What initiates the process? Is there any result in the
perceptual system? I think not, it happens only in the mind, not in the
senses.

3) Dream-thinking thus regresses back to the raw material of memory. What?

TIA. Bill S.

[M Winther]

For Freud, dreams are examples of regression, that is, we revert to a
more primitive functioning. This does not accord with Jung's view.

Your "hot potato" is not an example of regression. Rather, it is the way
in which personality as a whole becomes more primitive, and perhaps
lethargic. What initiates this process could be alcohol, depression,
inability to adapt to society, etc, etc.

So, in Freud's view, a person who is *not* regressive is an upstanding
member of society.

M. Winther

[bilsch01]

Thanks for your comment. But I can't help thinking based on the context
of the paragraph that a different sense of the word 'regression' is
being used. I want to know more about that definition of the word.

[M Winther]

Regression simply means reversion to a more primitive functioning. Freud
saw conscious thoughts and estimable social behaviour as progression. In
the dream state we become more primitive. We no longer employ linear
abstract thinking, but instead think in terms images, and we follow
impulses. In the dream, we can behave immorally and asocially.

So Freud's thought is not difficult to understand. We regress every
night. Yet, personality can also experience regression during waking
time, which could have damaging consequences.