Patients who claim to love children when the latter are well and healthy, avoid them, like a pest, when the children happen to fall sick, for fear of disease and for fear that the sick children may produce an evil influence on the patient’s “sensitive” nerves. The patient is afraid to come near sickness, or even afraid to hear of evil things, such as description of misfortunes, ailments, accidents, and sufferings, because they may upset him and arouse his fears of himself. All the patient wants is to be surrounded with cheer, joy, merriment, excitement, and happiness which he is unable to enjoy. The psychopathic patient is in constant search after happiness. Not that he is interested in the problem of happiness from a moral, philosophical, or even purely religious standpoint. His interest is of the crudest, the meanest, the most selfish kind. It is happiness for self,--for a low, mean, short, and brutish self. Psychopathic search for happiness is the anguish of the beast, cornered by terror. The patient is tortured by an unsuccessful search for happiness, ever tantalized by self and fear. Egotism, fear, ennui, restlessness, anxiety, discord are the harpies of psychopathic, neurotic life. _The love of the psychopathic patient is at bottom self-love_; it is like the love of the wolf for the lamb. Lover, husband, child, friend, father, mother, brother, sister, are all victims to the patient’s greedy self. The fear instinct has a positive and negative aspect. There is the fear of life, fear of putting forth energy in meeting the exigencies of life. The patient is afraid to participate in the struggle of life. Struggle spells to him danger, peril,--fear of the external world. Struggle means to him fear, suffering, and misery. The patient avoids society, avoids not only strangers, but even his acquaintances, friends, and sometimes his own family. While he constantly craves for ever new stimulations to his depleted nerves, he is at the same time in terror of everything that is _new_. The patient is afraid of life, he shirks duties, responsibilities, efforts, and joys of life struggle. Hence his love of automatism, routine, and fear-fatigue. The fear manifests itself more often in the form of the negative side of life, such as fear of sickness, weakness, incapacity, degradation, loss of vitality, and generally the fear of death. _Neurotic states are due to fear of life and fear of death._ CHAPTER XVII FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES The following principles may be regarded as fundamental in the development of psychopathic or nervous ills: I. _The Principle of Embryonic Psychogenesis_