When parents fail to teach their children to control their emotions; when they foster in them exaggerated notions of their importance by giving way to the children in everything, being over-solicitous about them, performing duties for them which the children should early be taught to perform for themselves, selfishness is an almost inevitable outgrowth. The children, in addition, may become quite unfitted to cope with the stresses of existence. And they may further become so psychically disorganised that, if after a time they no longer find themselves always having their own way, there may develop nervous symptoms which not merely are the product of an inner emotional storm, but are strangely designed to fulfil the nervous one's latent wish to remain the centre of interest and influence. Or, more bluntly stated, nervous attacks frequently are sheer manifestations of selfishness. It is selfishness that gives rise to them, and, though the victim may not be at all conscious of the fact, they represent an abnormal effort of the personality to attain selfish ends. This is not theory. It is an established truth, and is demonstrable from the case-histories of many nervous patients, adults and children alike. And, with increasing use of the most advanced methods of mental analysis, the influence of selfishness in causing nervous ailments is certain to become more widely appreciated than it is at present. Not that selfishness is the causal factor in all nervous cases. It would be absurdly false to assert anything of the kind, but the proportion of cases in which it does figure is astonishingly high. Parents need to know this; they need to recognise that failure to curb selfishness during the formative period of childhood may mean nervous wreckage, as well as the distorting of character. In the case of a child of so-called "nervous temperament"--a child, that is to say, who begins life with an unstable nervous organisation by reason of inherited weaknesses--nervous wreckage is almost certain to be the result of neglect to take precautions against the growth of selfishness. The full effects of parental neglect in this regard may not be visible for many years, but frequently they become disconcertingly evident while the child still is young. A case reported to me by a well-known American neurologist and psychopathologist is decidedly to the point in this connection, and may well be given in some detail. It is the case of a girl of fourteen who was brought to the neurologist because of nervous symptoms which took the form of periods of anxiety and depression, alternating with outbreaks of great irritability. The girl, her mother stated, seemed to have lost interest in everything. At times she would sit mournfully weeping; at others, fall into a passion for no apparent reason. More than once she had declared that she wanted to die. She could not, or would not, give any explanation of this most singular behaviour.