_The Conception of Sensitiveness._—We might say, and the psychoanalytical conception inclines in this direction, that this critical sensitiveness arises from some peculiar psychological personal history, which determined this end. We know that such sensitiveness in a psychogenic neurosis is always a symptom of a discord within the subject’s self, a symptom of a struggle between two divergent tendencies. Both tendencies have their own previous psychological story. In this case, we are able to show that this special resistance, the content of that critical sensitiveness, is, as a matter of fact, connected in the patient’s previous history, with certain infantile sexual manifestations, and also with that so-called traumatic event—all things which are capable of casting a shadow on sexuality. This would be so far plausible if the sister of the patient had not lived more or less the same life, without experiencing all these consequences. I mean, she did not develop a neurosis. So we have to agree that the patient experienced these things in a special way, perhaps more intensely than the younger one. Perhaps also, the events of her earlier childhood were to her of a disproportionate importance. But if it had been the case to such a marked extent, something of it would surely have been noticed earlier. In later youth, the earlier events of childhood were as much forgotten by the patient as by her sister. Another supposition is therefore possible. This critical sensitiveness is not the consequence of the special previous past history, but springs from something that had existed all along. A careful observer of small children can notice, even in early infancy, any unusual sensitiveness. I once analyzed a hysterical patient who showed me a letter written by her mother when this patient was two and a half years old. Her mother wrote about her and her sister. The elder was always good-tempered and enterprising, but the other was always in difficulties with both people and things. The first one became in later life hysterical, the other one katatonic. These far-reaching differences, which go back into earliest childhood, cannot depend on the more or less accidental events of life, but have to be considered as being innate differences. From this point of view, we cannot any longer pretend that her special previous psychological history caused this sensitiveness at that critical moment; it would be more correct to say: This innate sensitiveness is manifested most distinctly in uncommon situations.