Freud describes the inability of a child to detach its “libido” from the parent whom he asserts first awakens it, as a “mother-fixation.” His own mother-fixation takes the following startling form:[49] “It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death, which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth [he means the act of being born] is the first experience with fear, and is thus the source and model of the emotion of fear.” Here emerges his marvelous gift for the enunciation of inconsistent formulas. Birth, the “first experience with fear,” is the “source and the model of all fear.” Yet it is the pre-natal life, which knew no fear, which is the source of the fear of being buried alive. Moreover, unconscious thoughts about this happy life _in ventro_ have but to be projected into the future to become the source of a belief in a life after death--a belief which is fraught both with fear and hope to all those who entertain it. Then, to make his inconsistency complete, he maintains (in his essay on “The Anxiety Neurosis,” and in many other places) that “neurotic fear has its origin in the sexual life and corresponds to a libido which has been turned from its object.” From what object? One of the erogenous zones. Birth thus ceases to be the source of fear--at least of “neurotic” fear--unless we assumed that it was a the moment of birth that erotic passion was first awakened. Dr. Ernest Jones, in “_Zur Psycho-analyse der Kriegsneurosen_,” says that all fear is due to suppressed libidinousness, but adds that fear consists in anxiety lest the suppression be overcome and the erotic demon escape control. The natural hero, then, would be the man who either had no erotic impulses or was indifferent as to when and where and how they manifested themselves. Freud, perhaps, agrees with this. Yet evidently, like Hamlet (to whom also he attributes a mother-fixation) he still carries with him another fear--a “fear of something after death,” an apprehension of such “dreams” as may come in such a “sleep,” baffling all psycho-analysis and worse than the delusions of a suppressed libido--and this notwithstanding the blackish scales in the demonstration _ad ocolus_ and the incredible reasons which he gives for his “symptom.”