Cut off by his impotence fears from loving others fully and completely, A loved himself the more. He had unbounded confidence in the brilliance of his mind, and this intellectual arrogance was nourished by the easy ascendance which he won over the poorly educated people among whom he worked. He was careful to keep in environments where his mind would not be put to the test of keen competition. A didn’t compete with the clergymen who had the largest posts in his denomination, he struck out for himself in no hazardous business or professional enterprise, he took up and finished no piece of investigation; instead he cut a big figure among the workers, among whom he was the best-educated and the best-known leader. His chances of being elected to Congress when he was nominated were never good, and he had everything to gain and nothing to lose by making a campaign. After the days of his scholarly ascendance in high school and college, A fell out of competition in academic pursuits. He valued his capacity to produce words. Ferenczi remarked in conversation with me that the revolutionary agitators who had come to his attention had been noticeably deficient in the intensity of their emotional attachment to objects. They were notably indifferent to the accumulation of property, and they were lacking in possessive jealousy in their sexual life. This deficiency in warmth of affective experience was sensed by the revolutionaries themselves, who felt that they were in some way estranged from others. Their orgiastic indulgence in language is to be interpreted as an effort to heighten the affective intensity of their own lives. Either because the emotional life is physiologically defective or because the libido is too narcissistically fixated, this general description holds true of some obsessive and many psychotic persons. It was no doubt a factor in the history of A.