In the psychognosis of the particular condition, mental or nervous, be it object, idea, or action from which the patient suffers, the impulse of self-preservation with its instinctive emotion of fear can always be found in the background of consciousness or in the subconsciousness. An insight into a series of cases will help best to understand the fundamental psychopathological processes that give rise to the different forms of psychoneuroses and somatopsychoses. The inhibition of the patient’s activities, produced by the most primitive impulse of self-preservation with its instinct of fear, limits the patient’s life to such an extent that the interests and the activities are reduced to automatic repetition of reactions of a stereotyped character. The stimuli must be the same, otherwise the patient does not care to respond. He loses interest in his business, in reading, in his work, and games. The attention keeps on wandering. Games, pleasures, and hobbies in which he formerly used to take an interest lose their attraction for him. The life he is disposed to lead is of a vegetative existence. He is afraid of anything new. Things are done in an automatic way. _Routine and automatisms are characteristic of his activities._ The psychopathic or neurotic patient talks about his humanitarian ideals, about his great abilities superior to the common run of humanity, and how with his talents he is willing and has been willing to confer benefits on poor suffering humanity in spite of the fact that he has to struggle with his poor health, physical, nervous and mental. In spite of the overwhelming fatigue due to ill health, and in spite of the fearful ideas and impulses that have beset him day and night he still has succeeded in fighting his way through. The patient hankers for notoriety, for praise, for appreciation by other people. He is apt to complain that the family, neighbors, acquaintances, friends cannot appreciate his good points, his good will, and his high ideals to which he conforms his life, tortured as it is with pains and suffering of poor health. The _egocentric_ character of the psychopathic patient is bound up in his abnormally developed impulse of self-preservation and in his pathological state of the fear instinct. Thus one patient opens his account with the phrase: “From boyhood I had a sensitive conscience.” Another patient writes: “As a child I had a keener instinct as to the real unexpressed attitude of those about me toward each other than the average child.” One of my patients, a puny being of mediocre intelligence, writes: “I have always, from the earliest childhood, felt that I was different from those about me; and I must acknowledge that it was not alone a feeling of inferiority on account of poor control, but a feeling that I understood more than they. I was, however, of a delicate constitution and suffered from ill health.”