The recapitulation of the drives which the individual has experienced throughout his life is the process which lends unique value to the psychoanalytic interview record. The literature of psychoanalysis is full of sample fantasies which are assigned to places in the hypothetical sequence of personality growth. Over twenty years ago Freud wrote some preliminary remarks on character types, especially stressing the rôle of certain excretory pleasures in the development of some psychological structures. The sucking, biting and anal retention interests of the infant and young child have been the subject of theoretical treatment by several analysts, among whom Abraham is the most important. Ferenczi has sketched a comprehensive theory of the rise of genital interests on the part of the child, and this has been amplified in various directions by Reich. The differences between male and female development have been sketched by Sachs, Deutsch, and Horney. It is not within the necessary limits of this discussion to go farther into the nature of the hypotheses which have been proposed by these various investigators. We will be able to formulate them more precisely when we have succeeded in objectifying what happens in the course of the interview, and this is to be achieved along the lines previously sketched. Some day we can state hypotheses more definitely which can be taken and tested by non-analytical methods. Some of these conceptions can be confirmed or eliminated by the direct observation of children of all age groups. It is quite possible, however, paradoxical though it may sound, that the best way to study some phases of infancy and childhood will be to study the adult. There is some reason to believe that the superior expressive power of the adult, whether in words or in drawing, may render explicit many states which are beyond the scope of one who merely looks at movements. If we find that the subjective reconstructions during the adult analysis check closely with the results secured by modified analytical and behavioristic procedures applied directly to older children, we will have more confidence in the material which purports to relate to very early experience. We may also test out as far as possible the “historicity” of the reminiscences produced at different phases of the analysis. It should be said in passing that the analysis of children requires important revisions in the externals of the technique, as Anna Freud has shown. I want to stop at this point to comment upon the significance of the fact there should be such a thing as the psychoanalytic method of dealing with the genesis of personality. How does it happen that at the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Western European civilization this remarkably intricate procedure? Why do we regard it as worth while to spend months or even years in constant introspection?