When a well evolved individual has a desire which results from our culture or civilization (a wish to preserve her grace or her luxuries, for example), that is in conflict with a deeper primal instinct, she will often be able to reason out the situation, and in the case of approaching motherhood, decide that the baby is worth any sacrifice, any inconvenience, and go joyfully through her period of expectancy. She will glory in the consciousness of her ability to realize the supreme purpose of a woman’s creation. In other words she adjusts herself to the situation, harmonizes the discordant desires and is mentally undisturbed. A less well evolved woman, like a person with a delicate, easily upset digestive tract, will have difficulty in making an adjustment—in harmonizing her instinctive desire for motherhood and her acquired desire for comfort, attention and the things demanded by convention. The conflict may be violent enough to greatly upset her. This is particularly true if the demands of our cultural state make it necessary for the patient to keep this turmoil below the surface with no safety valve to relieve the pressure. This problem of the mother’s attitude toward the coming of the baby is very general and varied as well. The mothers of families already large and poverty stricken are usually quite frank in expressing their dismay over the expected birth and lament the prospect of this extra burden, but at the same time they decide to make the best of it and they succeed in making a pretty satisfactory adjustment. Moreover, they do not feel the necessity for concealing their feelings or do not “repress” them, and accordingly find some relief in being candid. The mothers of the middle and upper classes, however, are often surrounded by an atmosphere of conventional codes that are stifling to mental honesty. Accordingly they are less genuine in expressing their true attitude toward the coming child. To many of them—the selfish, self-centered type—the new baby will bring inconvenience rather than hardship. The importance of their ego will be dimmed. There will be a cutting down of luxuries and of freedom for social activities, and increased responsibility with closer confinement to the home. And while they give utterance to joy and pleasure over the prospect of having a baby, this does not quite reflect their inmost feelings. Not a few women find an outlet for the tension caused by their conflict by being fretful and irritable or through conduct which they would have displayed if annoyed or chagrined about something other than the approaching birth of a child. Because of this outlet they are not so likely to break down.