with the energies in question and bind them, the first thing that happens is a discharge in the form of morbid anxiety, so that we reach the comforting conclusion that a normal man would be entirely free from dread in the presence of any danger, however imminent, that he would be as fearless as Siegfried; it is a gratifying thought that there seem to be many such in our Army to-day. It seems to me probable that the intolerance of narcissistic sexual hunger which leads to dread in the presence of real danger is to be correlated with the inhibition of the other manifestations of the fear instinct, with the accumulated tension characteristic of the mode of life in the trenches. I would suggest, therefore, that investigations be undertaken from this point of view with cases of war neurosis, especially the anxiety cases. Many of the features noted by MacCurdy[18], for instance, accord well with the picture of wounded self-love: thus, the lack of sociability, the sexual impotence and lack of affection for relatives and friends, the feeling that their personality has been neglected, or slighted, that their importance is not sufficiently recognised, and so on. Perhaps a new light may also be thrown in this way on the attitude of such patients towards death. I understand that a great part of the war neurotic symptoms, and the battle dreams in particular, have been widely interpreted as symbolising the desire to die so as to escape from the horrors of life, an interpretation that does not accord well with the equally widespread view that the fundamental cause of such neuroses is a fear of death. I greatly doubt, on the contrary, whether the fundamental attitude is either a fear of death in the literal sense or a desire for death. The conscious mind has difficulty enough in encompassing in the imagination the conception of absolute annihilation, and there is every reason to think that the unconscious mind is totally incapable of such an idea. When the idea of death reaches the unconscious mind it is at once interpreted in one of two ways: either as a reduction of essential vital activity, of which castration is a typical form, or as a state of nirvana in which the ego survives, but freed from the disturbances of the outer world.