Here is a case capable of explanation by the Freudian hypothesis: A man said he had fallen on to the blade of an aeroplane propeller and bruised his neck; he complained of severe pain in one side of his neck, with twitching of the arm on the same side, which continued for months. It was found that the patient, who was apprenticed to engineering, had such a deep-seated fear of making mistakes that he had sometimes stayed at the workshop for hours after the day's work was over in order to familiarise himself with the use of tools; but in spite of this his fear increased, until the handling of a file or spanner produced feelings of anxiety. Then he joined the army. Being put to work at aeroplanes he tried to do his duty and succeeded so far as to be made a corporal, saying never a word about his fears and banishing them as far as possible from his thoughts. At last the repression broke forth and took symbolic form in pain, the expression of his fear of the machinery which was blamed as its material cause. No account can picture the emotion produced by the recall of this complex, and it was evident that his feelings were intense and of more importance to him than one unfamiliar with such cases would suppose. His pains ceased when the cause had been revealed, and, what is very important, when he was told that he could not be expected to work at machinery. It must be added that the out-and-out Freudian would not be satisfied with this explanation; he would trace the cause of the original fear of making mistakes, and would expect to find it in some repression of infantile desires or fears. Certainly I have a feeling that the case had only been half investigated, but it will serve as a simple example of symbolic representation. The 'secondary function' of this neurosis is plain: the patient succeeded in keeping away from machinery all the time the pain lasted, and his anxiety symptoms were powerful enough to lead to his removal to another kind of work. This leads on to Adler's theory,[15] which, like Freud's, is based upon conflict and repression, but regards the hysteria as derived from the 'Will to Power'. The potential neurotic has a feeling of inferiority combined with a desire to be master of his own fate, and, since direct attainment of this desire is impossible, the end is striven for by a fantasy or fiction produced by the unconscious. This view, thus baldly put, shows a relation between hysteria and malingering, and, returning to the case of the prentice engineer, we can see his work in the shop becoming more and more distasteful whilst his anxiety tended to become a means of escape; then in the army the neurosis took a more determined form which might be confounded with malingering by an observer who assumed that all actions were the result of conscious motives. [Footnote 15: _The Neurotic Constitution._ Kegan Paul.]