INPATIENT PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PRENATAL REGRESSION

Prenatal forms of regression are not often talked or written about, even in discussions or works concerned with inpatient psychotherapy. This is strange considering that life in hospital is particularly apt to induce such regressions and that, as far back as 1929, Simmel had already pointed out that patients treated in hospital‘by psychoanalysis’ tended to‘identify their life in the clinic … with the hidden intra‐uterine existence’(Simmel 1929, p. 86). It is suggested that if and when these forms of regression come to be better explored and understood, one way of dealing with them could be to use a modified form of the already well‐known and‘bipolar’ type of staff structure in which the difficulties which patients’ acting out between sessions often creates for the nursing staff are attended to by a member of staff other than the therapist himself.