The discovered antecedent experiences of childhood then give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the ringing of bells. It is a meaning—the _mise en scène_ of a tragedy of grief and a symbol of that tragedy. But was that tragedy with its grief the _real_ meaning of the child’s fear or, perhaps more correctly, the _whole_ of the meaning? And is it still the meaning in the mind of the adult woman? Does the mere conservation of a painful memory of grief explain its persistent recurrent subconscious functioning during twenty-five years, well into adult life, so that the child’s emotion shall be reawakened whenever one element (bell-tower) of the original experience is presented to consciousness? And, still more, can the persistence of a mere association of the affect with the object independently of a subconscious process explain the psychosis? Either of these two last propositions is absurd on its face as being opposed to the experience of the great mass of mankind. The vast majority of people have undergone disturbing, sorrowful or fear-inspiring experiences at some time during the course of their lives and they do not find that they cannot for years afterwards face some object or idea belonging to that experience without being overwhelmed with the same emotion. Such emotion in the course of time subsides and dies out. A few, relatively speaking, do so suffer and then, because contrary to general experience, it is called a psychosis. We must, then, seek some other and adequate factor in the case under examination. When describing the episode in the church, the subject stated that on one occasion she omitted to go to church to pray and the thought came to her that if her mother died it would be due to this omission, and _it would be her fault_. The “eye of God”[185] she thought was literally upon her in her every daily act and when her mother did die she thought that it was God’s punishment of herself because of that one failure. Consequently she thought _that she was to blame for her mother’s death_; that _her mother’s death was her fault_. She feared to face her mother’s death, not because of grief—that was a mere subterfuge, a self-deception—but because she thought she was to blame; and she feared to face towers with bells, or rather the ringing of bells, because they symbolized or stood for that death (just as a tomb-stone would stand for it), and in facing that fact she had to face her own fancied guilt and self-reproach and this she dared not do. _This was the real fear_, the fear of facing her own guilt. The emotion then was not only a recurrence of the affect associated with the church episode but a _reaction to self-reproach_. The ringing of bells, somewhat metaphorically speaking, reproached her as Banquo’s ghost reproached Macbeth. All this was the child’s point of view.