rlier chapter. Our task is now to consider the significance of these
death and rebirth delusions and their meaning for the stupor reaction.

Thoughts concerned with future and new activities require energy for
their completion in action and are therefore naturally accompanied by a
sense of effort which gives pleasure to an active mind. When the sum of
energy is reduced, one observes a reverse tendency called "regression."
It is easier to go back over the way we know than to go forward, so the
weakened individual tends to direct his attention to earlier actions or
situations. To meet a new experience one must think logically and keep
his attention on things as they are, rather than imagine things as one
would like to have them.

Progressive thinking is therefore adaptive, while regressive thinking is
fantastic in type, as well as concerned with the past--a past which in
fancy takes on the luster of the Golden Age. Sanity and insanity are,
roughly speaking, states where progressive or regressive thinking rule.
The essence of a functional psychosis is a flight from reality to a
retreat of easeful unreality.

Carried to the extreme, regression leads one in type of thinking and in
ideas back to childhood and earliest infancy. The final goal is a state
of mental vacuity such as probably characterizes the infant at the time
of birth and during the first days of extra-uterine life. In this state
what interest there is, is directed entirely to the physical comfort of
the individual himself, and contact with the environment is so
undeveloped that efforts to obtain from it the primitive wants of warmth
and nutrition are confined to vague instinctive cries. Evolution to true
contact with the world around implies effort, the exercise of
self-control, and also self-sacrifice, since the child soon learns that
some kind of _quid pro quo_ must be given. Viewed from the adult
standpoint, the emptiness of this early mental state must seem like the
Nirvana of death. At least death is the only simple term we can use to
represent such a complete loss of our habitual mental functions. When
life is difficult, we naturally tend to seek death. Were it not for the
powerful instinct of self-preservation, suicide would probably be the
universal mode of solving our problems. As it is, we reach a compromise,
such as that of sleep, in which contact with reality is temporarily
abandoned. In so far as sleep is psychologically determined, it is a
regre