He never remembered a time when his mother and father, who were divorced when he was eight, were on good terms with each other. They seldom spoke, except to quarrel. This family background was reflected in the mental life of the growing child. K was notoriously nervous and timid. From a very early day he began to be preoccupied with why he was different from everybody else in the world. His sense of isolation and strangeness led him to believe that perhaps he was the only real person in the world and that everybody else was an illusion. He would sometimes come up wonderingly to touch his mother, and then himself, to see if she, too, were real. He speculated on how he could get away from the human shadows around him, and became convinced that he could fly. Several times he laboriously climbed up on the seat of a kitchen chair, spread his arms like a bird, and leaped into space. Every time he crashed to the floor, his frightened mother rescued him, but he always felt surprised and rather aggrieved that he should fall, and secretly believed that he could fly after all. This type of reaction characteristically appears where emotional conflicts in the home create an acute problem of emotional orientation for the child. As a small boy he was sent by his mother to follow his father when he left the house, and to report where he went. K developed a strong sense of guilt for this, and after the divorce was afraid that his father would return and take revenge on him in some unknown and horrible way. His father did occasionally reappear, and once invited the boy to spend the night with him, but K was too frightened to accept. The family often lived in the country, and the self-consciousness of K in the presence of strangers was heightened by frequent removals into new and often isolated places. One of the towns near which he lived when about nine was on a frontier. Gun-play was frequent, and K remembers having seen the corpses of men who had been shot down in street brawls. There were ominous-looking fellows around town, and the boy gave them a wide berth. The death of his mother when he was twelve robbed K of his main emotional support in a dangerous world. She died after two years of suffering from an infected limb. She would also spit into bits of papers and burn them in the stove. K wondered why she did this, and later developed a reverie the importance of which will soon appear.