As a result of searching investigation by technical methods it was brought out that the specific object of the fear was _fainting_. When an attack developed, besides intense physiological disturbances and confusion of thought, there was in the content of consciousness a feeling that her mind was flying off into space and a definite thought of losing consciousness or fainting, and that she was going to faint. There was amnesia for these thoughts following the attacks. She never had fainted in the attacks and, as it later transpired, had fainted only once in her life. Here then, _dimly in the content_ of consciousness, was the object of the fear in an attack. But the object was afterwards forgotten; hence she could not explain what she was afraid of. Why fainting should be such a terrible accident to be feared she also could not explain. The question now was, what possible meaning could fainting have for her that she so feared it? This she did not know. Now, on still further investigation, I found that there was always in the fringe of consciousness during an attack and also during the anticipatory fear of an attack, _an idea and fear of death_. This, to use her expression, “was in the background of her mind”; it referred to impending fainting. It appeared then that in the fringe or ultra-marginal zone was the _idea of death as the meaning of fainting_. _Of this she was never aware._ It was really subconscious. It was the meaning of her idea of herself fainting. In consequence of this meaning fainting was equivalent to her own death. She would not have been afraid of fainting if she had not believed or could have been made to believe that in her case it did not mean death. We might properly say that the real object of the fear was death. When this content of the fringe of attention was recovered, the patient voluntarily remarked that she had not been aware of the presence during the attacks of that idea, but now she remembered it clearly, and also realized plainly why she was afraid of fainting,—what she had not understood before. (It must be borne in mind that this meaning of fainting, as a state equivalent to death, did not pertain to fainting in general but solely to herself. She knew perfectly well that fainting in other people was not dangerous; it was only an unrecognized belief regarding a possible accident to herself.) Besides this content of the fringe of attention it was also easy to show that the fringe often included the thought (or idea) which had been the immediate excitant of each attack. Sometimes this stimulus-idea entered the focus of attention; sometimes it was only in the fringe. In either case there was apt to be amnesia for it, but it could always be recalled to memory in abstraction or hypnosis. The content of consciousness taken as a whole, i.e., to include both the focus and the fringe of attention, then would adequately determine the meaning of this subject’s idea of fainting as applied to herself.