Having developed the idea that he must live up to the family ideal at any price, L felt that he could never depart from the opinions and customs of his parents. In politics he was a stout Republican, and later, when in a religious mood, he heard his preacher espouse the League. He felt that he ought to support the League, but was plunged into a serious conflict, because he thought his parents were against it. Greatly to his relief he discovered that his father and mother had also been won over to the League by a preacher, and that his lapse from orthodox Republicanism would not bring dishonor on the family. His father-hatred fantasies were very oppressive. They took the form of believing that if only his father were dead, his mother would have a much easier time of it. L’s father was suffering from a steadily advancing paralysis. At nine he dreamed that his father was in the bathtub and that around him were fat, red snakes that were bound to devour him. L who was standing by in the dream, awoke in a fright. He often dreamed that his father was away and that his mother was happy with him. L still shows many signs of his early neurosis in some of his ceremonial acts, and in the timid conservatism of his character. The private meaning of his political convictions is clear enough, for they are self-imposed obligations to lift his load of guilt for the murderous and incestuous fantasies which he long struggled to repress. The opinions of the family were sanctioned as a kind of religion. It is interesting to see how at first he invented a large array of ceremonial practices to substitute for his own illicit impulses, and later worked off his guilt feelings through the religious patterns which were provided by society, and which were revalidated on the basis of his private meanings. The acceptance of the political convictions of the family was on a par with the acceptance of theological dogma. Among the nonconformists to the family pattern we may choose M, whose history was taken by Stekel. M was a prominent socialist who agitated for an economic brotherhood of man, and whose most important private motive in this particular was a bitter hatred of his own brother. Most of this hatred was displaced from his brother on to capitalistic autocracy, and overreacted against by a social ideal of fraternal equality. His hatred of his own brother was not entirely disposed of by this displacement, and it was necessary to keep at a distance from him, and from many of his traits. Thus M despised music because his brother liked it, followed a style of dress at the opposite pole from his brother, and nearly walked out on the physician when he discovered that the physician had treated his own brother.