 True enough, we have a long, long way to back to contact the reality'.Jungians had however already warned that 'romantic regression meant a surrender to the non-rational side which had to be paid for by a sacrifice of the rational and individual side'; and Freud for his part had dourly noted that 'this extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted in direction; it may be described as a special capacity for involution – regression – since it may well happen that a later and higher level of development, once abandoned, cannot be reached again'.Anna Freud (1936) ranked regression first in her enumeration of the defense mechanisms', and similarly suggested that people act out behaviors from the stage of psychosexual development in which they are fixated.