Roger himself, however, is the real type of sufferer from morbid fear. He has inherited a peculiar disposition, and no doubt suffered from repressions, though nothing is said about this. He attributes his disease largely to anxiety about his sick sister, Lady Madeline. But the cause is in his unconscious. Those who are acquainted with the theories of psychoanalysis and the life of Poe will feel that Roger, like Poe, must have lost a mother early, then the mother of a friend, then his foster-mother. He also, like Poe, was no doubt thrice disappointed in love, and probably also drank. His symptoms were such as afflict neurotics. He was in constant terror and felt that he must die soon in some struggle with fear; he dreaded the future. He read strange books and imagined queer things. His sister died, and, with the aid of the narrator of the story, was buried in a vault in the house. He soon entertained fancies that he had buried her alive, and he was in mortal fear that she would wreak vengeance on him. When the teller of the story read to Roger some pages of a romance, Roger interpreted various unrelated actions described there as a rending of her coffin and the grating of iron hinges on her prison. He imagined she stood outside, and then that he was being crushed to death by her. And he died in fear. The vision of his sister was imaginary with him and the narrator as well, for Lady Madeline could not have escaped from the screwed down coffin and the vault, and having lain many days without food, would not have had strength to crush her brother to death. Usher died because of morbid fear. Poe was a good delineator of the neuroses. Here we have a picture of his own life and know that he must have experienced some sort of anxiety, as the tale is so true to life. He was only thirty when the story was published, and the main character here, as in _Berenice_ and the _Assignation_, is a neurotic. Behind it all one sees the mourner for the lost Lenore, the orphan, the victim of love through Stella Royster, Elizabeth Herring and Mary Devereaux.