left undisturbed, and frenzied only when a regulation of her environment prevented her from accomplishing something which she thought quite natural as a result of her blissful dream. This psychosis, unintelligible as it was in its time, was revealed ten years later through hypnotic analysis. The fact to which I call attention is this: That the content of such an hallucinatory psychosis consists in directly bringing into prominence that idea which was threatened by the motive of the disease. One is therefore justified in saying that through its flight into the psychosis the ego defended the unbearable idea; the process through which this has been brought about withdraws itself from self perception as well as from the psychological-clinical analysis. It is to be considered as the expression of a higher grade of pathological disposition, and can perhaps be explained as follows: The ego tears itself away from the unbearable idea, but as it hangs inseparably together with a part of reality, the ego while accomplishing this performance also detaches itself wholly or partially from reality. The latter is, in my opinion the condition under which hallucinatory vividness is decreed to particular ideas, and hence after very successful defense the person finds himself in a hallucinatory confusion. I have but very few analyses of such psychoses at my disposal; but I believe that we deal with a very frequently employed type of psychic illness. For analogous examples such as the mother who becoming sick after the loss of her child continues to rock in her arms a piece of wood, or the jilted bride who in full dress expects her bridegroom, can be seen in every insane asylum. It will perhaps not be superfluous to mention that the three forms of defense here considered, and hence the three forms of disease to which this defense leads may be united in the same person. The simultaneous occurrence of phobias and hysterical symptoms, so frequently observed in praxis, really belongs to those moments which impede a pure separation of hysteria from other neuroses and urge the formation of the “mixed neuroses.” To be sure the hallucinatory confusion is not frequently compatible with the continuation of hysteria and not as a rule with obsessions; but on the other hand it is not rare that a defense psychosis should episodically break through the course of a hysteria or mixed neurosis. In conclusion I will mention in few words the subsidiary idea of which I have made use in this discussion of the defense neuroses. It is the idea that there is something to distinguish in all psychic functions (amount of affect, sum of excitement), that all qualities have a quantity though we have no means to measure the same—it is something that can be increased, diminished, displaced, and discharged, and that extends over the memory traces of the ideas perhaps like an electric charge over the surface of the body.