I said last time that we would take, as a starting-point for further work, the knowledge we have gained already, and not the doubts which it has roused in us. We have not yet even begun to discuss two of the most interesting conclusions arising from the analysis of the two examples. First: both the patients give the impression that they are “_fixed_” to a particular point in their past, that they do not know how to release themselves from it, and are consequently alienated from both present and future. They are marooned in their illness, as it were; just as in former times people used to withdraw to the cloister to live out their unhappy fate there. In the case of the first patient, it was the marriage to the husband, which in reality had long ago come to an end, that had settled this doom upon her. Her symptoms enabled her to continue her relationship with him; we could perceive in them the voices which pleaded for him, excused him, exalted him, lamented his loss. Although she is young and could attract other men, she has seized upon every possible real and imaginary (magical) precaution that will preserve her fidelity to him. She will not meet strangers, she neglects her appearance; moreover, she cannot readily rise from any chair which she sits upon, and she refuses to sign her name and can give no presents, because no one must have anything which is hers. With the second patient, the young girl, it is the erotic attachment to the father established in the years before puberty that plays this part in her life. She also has herself perceived that she cannot marry as long as she is so ill. We may suspect that she became so ill in order to be unable to marry and so to remain with her father. We cannot avoid asking the question how, by what means, and impelled by what motives, anyone can take up such an extraordinary and unprofitable attitude towards life. Provided, that is, that this attitude is a universal character of neurosis and is not a special peculiarity of these two patients. As a matter of fact, this is so; it is a universal trait common to every neurosis, and one of great practical significance. Breuer’s first hysterical patient was _fixated_, in the same way, to the time when her father was seriously ill and she nursed him. In spite of her recovery, she has remained to some extent cut off from life since that time; for although she has remained healthy and active, she did not take up the normal career of a woman. In every one of our patients we learn through analysis that the symptoms and their effects have set the sufferer back into some past period of his life. In the majority of cases it is actually a very early phase of the life-history which has been thus selected, a period in childhood, even, absurd as it may sound, the period of existence as a suckling infant.