During the war a woman patient who had two sons at the front, was tortured every night by a nightmare in which she saw her older son killed in action. She very naturally interpreted those dreams to herself as convincing evidence of her greater fondness for that boy than for his brother. In the course of our conversations, however, she gradually admitted that her elder son was a gambler and drunkard and had found himself in many an unpleasant complication. She had thought several times, altho she had at once repressed the thought, that death would be preferable to his life of embarrassment and degradation. Those repressed death wishes found an outlet in nightmares accompanied by a great display of emotion consciously felt as love and grief. Parents who continually warn their children against accidents "likely" to happen to them, who grow panicky when some street commotion takes place and imagine that their child has been hurt or killed, are not quite as loving as they imagine. In such unjustified fears, as in death dreams, there lurks an ill concealed desire to be freed from the thraldom of parenthood and to regain the selfish happiness of the childless state. A young woman fainted several times when she heard shouts on the street where her young child had been taken by the maid. She "knew" something must have happened to her boy. Her dreams would with alarming frequency picture accidents befalling the child. After I made her realise the way in which her child had interfered with her social activities, with her attending dances, theatrical performances, etc., a change became noticeable in her dreams. Instead of visualising her child dead she saw him in her day and night dreams as an adolescent, no longer in her way, no longer a handicap to her in her pursuit of pleasure. Her panics disappeared about the same time. More elusive at times are cases of hatred which analysis reduces to a struggle of the personality against an inacceptable love. =Sour Grapes.= A man, unduly attracted to a woman who socially, intellectually or financially, is or should remain outside of his reach, and would probably make an impossible mate, is likely to manifest violent hostility to her, to disparage her or even slander her. Every analyst has seen in his office the middle aged woman who "breaks down" soon after her daughter's marriage to a man whom she "despises." Either a family scene or a campaign of nagging and disparagement has caused a break between her and her daughter and son-in-law.