Morbid fear or anxiety is well depicted by Poe, especially in his _Fall of the House of Usher_. As we learn from psychoanalysis, morbid fear is inhibited sexual desire; it is a reaction against the libido. The individual's sexual impulses incapable of being repressed strive for forms of wish fulfilment, and these when repugnant are treated like something hostile, and provoke fear. Morbid fear differs from normal fear in being continuous and attributed to a source which is not the real one, the actual source being unconscious. If a woman, for example, is very much in love with a man who turns out to be a vile criminal, her love may become incapable of being fulfilled any longer because of the part played by her moral sense; shrinking from contemplating her love's fulfilment with the man she really still loves, she may develop an anxiety. This is only one of the innumerable cases of misdirected desire that may cause anxiety. Then there are physiological factors responsible also. Dr. Brink has made a study of the subject. Poe had himself suffered from a damming of the libido. He is Roger Usher, and is describing his own morbid fear. One feels that the narrator of the tale presents a case of psychosis, for he sees impossible things happen. He imagines the house had a pestilent vapour about it. He tells us that Roger's condition infected him, and that the wild influences of Roger's fantastic and impressive superstition crept over him. He must have been deranged, for he imagines that he sees Roger's dead sister, whose coffin had been screwed down by them, come out of the vault and drag Roger to death. He also thinks he sees the house crumble into fragments and sink into the tarn. Either his whole narrative is a hallucination or only these few parts of it are.