But why this meaning of fainting? It must have been derived from antecedent experiences. An idea can no more have a meaning without antecedent experiences with which it is or once was linked than can the word “parallelopipedon” have a geometrical meaning without a previous geometrical experience, or “Timbuctoo” a personal meaning without being set in a personal experience, whether of missionaries or hymn-books. I will not take the time to give the detailed results of the investigation by hypnotic procedures that followed. I will merely summarize by stating that the fear of death from fainting was a recurrent memory, i.e., _a recurrence of the content of consciousness_ of a moment during an incident that occurred more than twenty years before, when she was a young girl about 18 years of age. At the time as the result of a nervous shock she had fainted, and just before losing consciousness she definitely thought her symptoms meant death. At this thought she became frightened, and ever since she has been afraid of fainting. There was no conscious association between her phobia and this youthful episode. When the memory of the latter was recovered she remarked, “I wonder why I never thought of that before.” But this again was not all. A searching investigation of the unconscious (residua) in deep hypnosis revealed the fact that death from fainting was organized with still wider experiences involving a fear of death. At the moment of the nervous shock just before fainting (_fancied as dying_) she thought of her mother who was dangerously ill from _cancer_ in an adjoining room, and a great fear swept over her at the thought of what might happen to her mother if she should hear of the cause of her (the patient’s) nervous shock and of her _death_. It further transpired that the idea of death and fear of it were set in a still larger series of experiences.[170] It had, indeed, dated from a childhood experience when she was eight years of age. At that time she was frightened when a pet animal died and a fear of death had been more or less continuously present in her mind ever since, but not always consciously so; meaning that it was sometimes in awareness and sometimes in the _ultra-marginal zone_ of consciousness. She had been able to conceal the fear until the fainting episode occurred and, as she in hypnosis asserted, fear afterward had continued to be present more or less persistently, although _she was not conscious of the fact when awake_ (excepting in the phobic attacks) and it had attached itself to various ideas of intercurrent illnesses. But these ideas could all be reduced to two, _fainting and cancer_. Ever since her mother’s illness and death she had a fear of death from cancer, believing she might inherit the disease. This thought and the fear it aroused had been constantly in her mind but never previously confessed. It was the real meaning of her fear of illness which had been conspicuous and puzzling to her physician. She