(2) The second principle is that all neurotic symptoms are the product of an intrapsychical conflict which the person has failed satisfactorily to resolve, and that they constitute a compromise formation between the two conflicting forces. Here, again, I think that those who have been investigating the psychology of war neuroses will agree with this principle. MacCurdy,[12] in particular, has described in great detail the conflict that arises in soldiers between, on the one hand, the motives actuating to continuance at duty and concealment of growing sense of incapacity and apprehension, and, on the other, the awful sense of failure accompanying the sometimes almost overwhelming desire to escape from the horrors of their position. The neurosis offers a way out of this dilemma, the only way that the particular person is able to find, and the actual symptoms, which are often grossly incapacitating, such as blindness, represent the fulfilment of the desire against which the man has been fighting. We reach, therefore, the wish-fulfilment part of Freud’s theory. (3) The third principle is that the operative wish that leads to the creation of the neurosis is an unconscious one. Freud means this in the full sense of the word, and in this sense the principle has not yet been confirmed from the experience of the war neuroses. There are, however, different degrees of unconsciousness of a mental process, and the important point to Freud is not so much the degree of the unawareness in itself—this being largely an index of the repression—as the repression or dissociation that has led to the unawareness. What he maintains is that the wish producing the neurosis is one that is not in harmony with the ego-ideal, and which is therefore kept at as great a distance as possible from it. Anyone who has read the touching accounts given by MacCurdy or Rivers[13] of the shame that soldiers feel at their increasing sense of fear, and the efforts they make to fight against it, to conceal it from others, and if possible from themselves, will recognise that the wish in question is one alien to the ego-ideal and is well on in the first stages of repression, even if it is half-avowed. (4) The fourth principle is that current repressed wishes cannot directly produce a neurosis, but do so only by reviving and reinforcing the wishes that have been repressed in older unresolved conflicts. According to Freud, a pathogenetic disappointment or difficulty in readjustment leads first to an introversion or turning inwards of feeling, and the wish that has been baulked seeks some other mode of gratification. It tends to regress back to an older period of life, and thus to become associated with similarly baulked and repressed wishes belonging to older conflicts. It is the combination of these two, the present and the old, that is the characteristic mark of the pathogenesis of neurotic disorders as distinct from other modes of reaction to the difficulties of life.