And one thing more! Has it not struck you that this innocent obsessive act leads directly to this lady’s most private affairs? A woman can hardly have anything more intimate to relate than the story of her wedding-night; and is it by chance and without special significance that we are led straight to the innermost secrets of her sexual life? It might certainly be due to the choice I made of this example. Let us not decide this point too quickly; but let us turn to the second example, which is of a totally different nature, and belongs to a very common type, that of rituals preparatory to sleep. A well-grown clever girl of 19, the only child of her parents, superior to them in education and intellectual activity, was a wild, high-spirited child, but of late years had become very nervous without any apparent cause. She was very irritable, particularly with her mother, was discontented and depressed, inclined to indecision and doubt, finally confessing that she could no longer walk alone through squares and wide streets. We will not go very closely into her complicated condition, which requires at least two diagnoses: agoraphobia and obsessional neurosis; but will turn our attention to the ritual elaborated by this young girl preparatory to going to bed, as a result of which she caused her parents great distress. In a certain sense, every normal person may be said to carry out a ritual before going to sleep, or at least, he requires certain conditions without which he is hindered in going to sleep; the transition from waking life to sleep has been made into a regular formula which is repeated every night in the same manner. But everything that a healthy person requires as a condition of sleep can be rationally explained, and if the external circumstances make any alteration necessary he adapts himself easily to it without waste of time. The morbid ritual on the other hand is inexorable, it will be maintained at the greatest sacrifices; it is disguised, too, under rational motives and appears superficially to differ from the normal only in a certain exaggerated carefulness of execution. On a closer examination, however, it is clear that the disguise is insufficient, that the ritual includes observances which go far beyond what reason can justify and even some which directly contravene this. As the motive of her nightly precautions, our patient declares that she must have silence at night and must exclude all possibility of noise. She does two things for this purpose; she stops the large clock in her room and removes all other clocks out of the room, including even the tiny wrist-watch on her bed-table. Flower-pots and vases are placed carefully together on the writing-table, so that they cannot fall down in the night and break, and so disturb her sleep. She knows that these precautions have only an illusory justification in the demand for quiet; the ticking of the little watch could not be