The patient was an extremely timid creature. She lived in Russia in a small town where the religious persecutions of the neighbors were persistent and unremittent. To this were joined the petty annoyances by the village police, the representatives of which acted with all the cruel tyranny characteristic of the old Russian regime. The patient’s family was in constant terror. In childhood the patient has undergone all the horrors of the _pogromi_ with all the terrors of inquisitorial tortures. A highly sensitized impulse of self-preservation and intense easily stimulated fear instinct were the essence of the patient’s life. She was afraid of everything, of her very shadow, of anything strange, more so in the dark, and at night. With this morbid self-preservation and intensified fear instinct there were associated superstitions to which her mind was exposed in early childhood, and in her later life. The patient lived at home in the fear of the most savage superstitions and prejudices, characteristic of the poor ignorant classes of Eastern European countries, and outside the house she was in fear of her life. The patient was brought up on fear and nourished on fear. No wonder when she was run down, and met with a fear shock, that the fear instinct seized on her and gave rise to the symptoms of physical and mental paralysis. To this life of terror we may add the extreme poverty in which the patient lived in Russia and afterwards in this country. The hard work in a sweat-shop and the ill nutrition ran down the patient and further predisposed her to disability and disease. Patient lived in constant dread of actual starvation, with fear of having no shelter, with fear of no roof over her head. She was so timid that she was scared by any sudden movement, or by a severe, harsh, threatening voice. She was extreme suggestible, imitative, and credulous. She was like a haunted animal, like a scared bird in the claws of a cat. Fear often threw her into a state of rigidity. The patient suffered from a fear of fatigue, from fear of exhaustion, from fear of disability, from fear of paralysis, pain, sickness, and death, fear of the negative aspect of the most primitive, and most fundamental of all impulses, the impulse of self-preservation. The fear psychosis, based on an abnormally developed fear instinct which formed the main structure of her symptom complex, had a real foundation in the psycho-physiological condition of her organism. The patient actually suffered from fatigue due to exhaustion, underfeeding, and overworking.