and not as a resistance against the conscious admittance of a painful remembrance. You will ask with astonishment, to what aim the patient contrives such a phantasy? You will even be inclined to suggest that the physician forced the patient to invent it, otherwise she would probably never have produced such an absurd idea. I do not venture to doubt that there have been cases in which, by dint of the physician’s desire to find a cause, especially under the influence of the shock-theory, the patient has been brought to contrive such phantasies. But the physician would never have come to this theory, had he not followed the patient’s line of thought, thus taking part in this retrograde movement of the libido which we call regression. The physician, consequently, only carried right through to its consequence what the patient was afraid to carry out, namely, a regression, a falling back of the libido to its former desires. The analysis, in following the libido-regression, does not always follow the exact way marked by its historical development, but very often rather a later phantasy, which only partly depends on former realities. In our case, only some of the circumstances are real, and it is but much later that they get their great importance, namely, at the moment when the libido regresses. Wherever the libido takes hold of a reminiscence, we may expect that this reminiscence will be elaborated and altered, as everything that is touched by the libido revives, takes on dramatic form, and becomes systematized. We have to admit that, in our case, almost the greater part of these phantasies became significant subsequently, after the libido had made a regression, after it had taken hold of everything that could be suitable, and had made out of all this a phantasy. Then that phantasy, keeping pace with the retrograde movement of the libido, came back at last to the father and put upon him all the infantile sexual desires. Even so it was thought in ancient times that the golden age of Paradise lay in the past! In the case before us we know that all the phantasies brought out by analysis did become subsequently of importance. From this standpoint only, we are not able to explain the beginning of the neurosis; we should constantly move in a circle. The critical moment for this neurosis was that in which the girl and man were inclined to love one another, but in which an inopportune sensitiveness on the part of the patient caused the opportunity to slip by.