The children divided between the contesting parents, taking sides. The son was entirely with his mother. He was unhappy because she had to put up with so much and he goaded her on all the time, urging her to carry the fight to a successful issue and even advising her to seek separation from her husband. He had nothing good to say about his father, outside the latter’s business ability. He described the father as a cold-blooded fellow without a heart, a mere adding machine, etc.... On a superficial examination it looked as if he loved his mother and hated his father. But back of that hatred there stood the carefully preserved love of his earlier years. That love, however, he was unwilling to acknowledge. That was the critical point in the analysis. He always recoiled whenever the analysis led to his fondness of the father, or various signs pointed out his aboriginal attitude towards the father. Any analysis leads sooner or later to a similar experience. Nothing is more difficult than to dissolve the father hatred and reduce it back to its infantile components,—love. But in his homosexual acts he played the rôle of the father who is tender with the child. We also perceive now why he felt himself suddenly attracted to that elderly gentleman with the energetic face. He was an image of his own strict father. Having witnessed in his childhood a terrific struggle between man and woman, and having himself taken a part in that merciless struggle for supremacy, he was bound to conceive the problem of love as a struggle for supremacy, a competitive struggle in the will to power. His supreme question always was: “_Who is the stronger one?_” This case shows us with remarkable clearness the mechanisms on which _Alfred Adler_ lays such great stress. But it also shows the incestuous love for the sister, a tendency of which he was aware. In the young men he sought the reproductions of his sister’s picture. He also showed a fixation upon the mother, with whom he was seldom on agreeable pleasant terms. Nevertheless he has not forgotten the early tendernesses of his father. In the wish to be squeezed to death, his masochistic fancies revolve around the masked image of his severe father standing like a shadow. To be master, to be slave—his whole system of thinking revolved around these two notions. He has social intercourse only with men towards whom he feels himself superior. Already as a child he chose his comrades among the children of the poor, because he could domineer them. He abandoned one friendship because his friend made jokes at his expense. He was not a handsome child. That drove him into the path of hatred and envy. He hated all women because they were his rivals with the father. He thought he would have been liked better if he had been a handsomer fellow.