The Only Use of

regress
in
The Goldfinch

And, um, I know this sounds weird —" in fact, it was a completely lunatic analogy, crackpot, insane, but I didn't know any other way to work around to what I wanted to say —"but you know Barbara Guibbory, who does those seminars up in Rhinebeck, those past-life-regression things?†
p. 616.9

Definitions:

(1) (regress as in: regressed instead of progressed)
returning to a former (less advanced) state
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Specialized definitions of regression include:
- tax policy: regressive taxes cost the poor more relative to their income than the rich
- mathematics or statistics: the process of finding any relationship between variables
- psychology: go back to more childish behavior
- parapsychology: return in one's mind to a previous life (usually under hypnosis)
- logic: reasoning from conclusion to evidence