Now even if the mother’s death were logically, by a train of fortuitous circumstances, the patient’s fault, why did an otherwise intelligent woman lay so much stress upon an irresponsible child’s behavior? The child after all behaved no differently from other children. People do not consciously blame themselves in after life for the ultimate consequences of childhood’s heedlessness. According to common experience such self-reproaches do not last into adult life without some continuously acting factor. A search in this case into the unconscious brought to light a persisting idea that when events in her life happened unfortunately it was due to her fault. It had cropped out again and again in connection with inconsequential as well as consequential matters. She had, for instance, been really unable on many occasions to leave home on pleasure trips for fear lest some accident might happen within the home and consequently it would be due to her fault; and if away she was in constant dread of something happening for which she would be to blame. It was not a fear of what might happen—an accident to the children, for example—but that it would be her fault. I have heard her, when some matter of apparently little concern had gone wrong, suddenly exclaim, “Was it my fault?” her voice and features manifesting a degree of emotion almost amounting to terror. When her brother died (still earlier, before her mother’s death) she had blamed herself for that death, as later with her mother, on the same religious grounds. This self-reproach for happenings, fancied as due to her fault, has frequently appeared in her dreams. It would take us too far afield to trace the origin and psychogenesis of this idea. Suffice to say, it can be followed back to early childhood when she was five or six years of age. She was a lonely, unhappy child. She thought herself ugly and unattractive and disliked and that so it always would be through life, and it was all her fault because she was ugly, as she thought.[186] The instinct of self-abasement (McDougall[187]) or negative self-feeling (Ribot) dominated the personality as the most insistent instinct and from its intensity within the self-regarding sentiment (McDougall) formed a sentiment of self-depreciation. She wanted to be liked and believed it to be her own fault that, as she fancied, she was not and never would be, and reproached herself accordingly. This sentiment of self depreciation with its impulse to render self-reproach has persisted, as with many people, all her life and has been fostered by unwise and thoughtless domestic criticism. The persistence to the present day of this impulse to self-reproach is shown in the following observation: