Now, as respects the simple normal ideas of everyday life, such as I have just cited, a person can give very clearly his viewpoint. He has a very definite notion of the meaning of his perceptions and can give his reasons for them based on his associative memories of past experiences which he can recall. But in the conditions to which I am now referring _a person can give no explanation_ of a particular viewpoint which may be of a very definite but unusual (abnormal) character. Nor can he recall any experiences which would explain the origin of it. I have in mind particularly the obsessions. Now, according to my observations, we find in the marginal zones of the content of consciousness conscious elements which in particular cases may even give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the pathological idea. I have found in these zones thoughts which gave meaning to emotions and other symptoms excited by apparently inadequate objects. Thus, in H. O., attacks of recurrent nausea and fear almost prohibiting social intercourse were always due to thoughts of self-disgust hidden in the fringe. Let us take a concrete case, that of a person who has a pathological fear and who, as we know is often the case, can give no explanation of his viewpoint. The fear may be that of fainting, or of thunderstorms, of a particular disease, say cancer, or of so-called “unreality” attacks, or what not. This so-called “fear” is of course an idea of self or other object linked with, or which occasions as a reaction, the strong emotion of fear. It recurs in attacks which are excited by stimuli, of one kind or another, that are associated with the idea. The patient can give no explanation of the _meaning_ of this idea that renders intelligible why it should occasion his fear. There is nothing in his consciousness, so far as he knows, which gives an adequate meaning to it. Thus, for example, C. D. was the victim of attacks of fear; the attacks were so intense that at times she had been almost a prisoner in her house, in dread of attacks away from home; and yet she was unable even after two prolonged searching examinations to define the exact nature of the fear which was the salient feature of the attacks, or, from her ordinary memories, to give any explanation of its origin. She remembered many moments in the last twenty years when the fear had come upon her with great intensity, but she could not recall the date of its inception and, therefore, the conditions under which it originated; consequently nothing satisfactory could be elicited beyond an early history of “anxiety attacks” or indefinable fear of great intensity attached to no specific idea that she knew.