This analogy tempts us also to classify as traumatic those experiences to which our nervous patients seem to be fixated. In this way we should be provided with a simple condition for a neurotic illness; it would be comparable to a traumatic illness and would result from an incapacity to deal with an overpowering affective experience. Indeed, the first formula in which Breuer and I, in 1893–95, reduced our new observations to a theory was expressed very similarly. A case like that of the first patient described, the young woman separated from her husband, fits very well into this description; she had not been able to “get over” the impracticability of her marriage and was still attached to her trauma. But the second case of the young girl who was tied to her father shows us at once that the formula is not comprehensive enough. On the one hand, an infantile adoration of her father by a little girl is such a common experience and so frequently grown out of that the term ‘traumatic’ would lose all its meaning if applied to it; on the other hand, the history of the case shows that this first erotic fixation was gone through by the patient quite harmlessly at the time, to all appearances, and only several years later came to expression in the obsessional neurosis. So we see that there are complications ahead, a considerable variety and number of determining factors in neurosis; but we divine that the traumatic view will not necessarily be abandoned as false, and that it will fit in and have to be co-ordinated properly elsewhere. Here again we must leave the path we have been following. At the moment it will take us no further, and we have much more to learn before we can find a satisfactory continuation of it. But before leaving the subject of fixation to traumata it should be noted that it is a phenomenon manifested extensively outside the neuroses; every neurosis contains such a fixation, but not every fixation leads to a neurosis, or is necessarily combined with a neurosis, or arises in the course of a neurosis. Grief is a prototype and perfect example of an affective fixation upon something that is past, and, like the neuroses, it also involves a state of complete alienation from the present and the future. But even the lay public distinguishes clearly between grief and neurosis. On the other hand, there are neuroses which may be described as morbid forms of grief. It does also happen that persons may be brought to a complete standstill in life by a traumatic experience which has shaken the whole structure of their lives to the foundations, so that they give up all interest in the present and the future, and live permanently absorbed in their retrospections; but these unhappy persons do not necessarily become neurotic. Therefore this single feature must not be overestimated as a characteristic of neurosis, however invariable and significant it may be otherwise.