a useful mental state, but it often goes on further into a condition of developed dread or terror which is certainly the very reverse of useful, for it not only paralyses whatever action may be suitable, but even inhibits the functioning of the mind, so that the person cannot judge or decide what he ought best to do were he able to do it. The whole reaction of “real” fear is thus seen to consist of two useful components and one useless one, and it is just this useless one that most resembles in all its phenomena the condition of morbid anxiety. Further, there is seen to be a complete lack of relation between development of dread and the degree or imminence of danger, nor does it bear any relation to the useful defensive activities. Thus, one does not flee because one is frightened, but because one perceives danger; in situations of extreme danger men very often respond with suitable measures of flight, fight, or what not, when they are not in the least degree frightened; on the other hand, the neurotic can be extremely frightened when there is no external danger whatever. The inference from these considerations is that even in situations of real danger a state of developed dread is not part of the useful biological mechanism of defence, but is an abnormal response akin to the neurotic symptom of morbid anxiety. In a recent publication[17] Freud has made the striking suggestion that the developed dread sometimes found in situations of real danger is derived, not from the repressed sexual hunger that is directed towards external objects, as is the case with morbid anxiety of the peace neuroses, but from the narcissistic part of the sexual hunger that is attached to the ego, and I venture to suggest that we may here have the key to the states of terror with which we are so familiar in the war neuroses. The psycho-analytic investigations of recent years have laid increasing stress on the distinction between “object-libido”, the sexual impulses that are directed outwards, and the “ego-libido”, the narcissistic portion that is directed inwards and constitutes self-love. There is good reason to suppose that the latter is the more primary of the two, and also the more extensive—though the least explored as yet—so that it constitutes, as it were, a well from which externally directed sexuality is but on overflow. The analogy naturally occurs to one of the protoplasmic outpourings in the pseudopodia of the amœba, and the reciprocal relation of these to the main body seems to be similar to that between love of others and self-love. It has been known for some time that there is a limit on the part of the organism to tolerate without suffering more than a given quantity of sexual hunger in its familiar sense of impulses directed outwards, and analytic study of the psychoses, notably of paraphrenia, has shewn that the same is even more profoundly true of the narcissistic sexual hunger. In both cases, before other symptoms are formed so as to deal