It is obvious that an acceptance of death implies rather thorough mental disintegration. Before that takes place there may be some mental conflict. The instinct of self-preservation may prevent the individual from welcoming the notion of dissolution, so that this latter idea, though insistent, is not accepted but reacted to with anxiety; hence we often meet with onsets of stupor characterized by emotional distress. It has already been suggested that death may foreshadow another existence. Often in the psychoses we meet with the idea of eternal union in death with some loved one whom the vicissitudes and restrictions of this life prevent from becoming an earthly partner. This fancy is frequently the basis of elation. Similarly, new life in a religious sense as expressed in the delusion of translation to Heaven, is a common occasion for ecstasy. These formulations of the death idea may occur as tentative solutions of the patient’s problems leading to temporary manic episodes while the psychosis is incubating. It seems that stupor as such appears only when death and nullity are accepted. The above are more or less a priori reasons for regarding the stupor as a regressive reaction. We must now consider the clinical evidence to support this view. In the first place, we always find that stupor occurs in an individual who is unhappy and who has found no other solution than regression for the predicament in which he is. There is nothing specific in the cause of this unhappiness. At times the factors producing it are mainly environmental; at others, the problem is essentially of the patient’s own making. Of course almost any type of functional psychosis may emerge from such a state of dissatisfaction, but it is important to note that unlike manic states, for instance, stupors invariably develop from a situation of unhappiness. Quite frequently the choice of the stupor regression is determined by some definitely environmental event which suggests death. This often comes as the actual death of the patient’s father (in the case of a woman) or employer, events which inflate the already existing, although perhaps unconscious, desire for mutual death. Again, the precipitating factor may be a situation which adds still another problem and makes the burden of adaptation intolerable, forcing on him the desire for death. In these cases the actual psychosis is sometimes ushered in dramatically with a vision of some dead person (often a woman’s father) who beckons, or there are dream-like experiences of burial, drowning, and so on. A few cases taken at random from our material exemplify these features of the unhappiness in which the psychosis appears as a solution with its development of the death fancy.