In my cases of recurrent mental states, especially of the phobia type, I find on the soil of a sensitive nervous organization the presence of a fundamental state of primitive fear of the unfamiliar and the strange, an instinctive fear characteristic of all animal life, and rooted in the fundamental impulse of self-preservation. In most people this primitive animal and child fear is inhibited by training and familiar environment, but in our psychoneurotics this instinctive fear is not inhibited, in fact it is even over developed. Under certain unfavorable conditions of training, especially religious, this primitive fear may be combined with a developed sense of the mysterious, and the result is fear of the mysterious. The two, however, are often simply associated and do not form a composite fear state. This association of the instinctive primitive fear and the sense of the mysterious and the unknown constitutes the soil on which all forms of anxiety and phobopsychoses grow luxuriously.

        The fear instinct and the sense of the mysterious when trained by religion, morality, and accompanied by deeply rooted superstitions and prejudices of a religious and moral character may attach themselves to any sphere of life, sexual, professional, or purely personal, and give rise to the phobias or to the anxieties of psychoneuroses. The feeble personality of the child becomes the victim of fears. We have thus the fear of having committed some awful wrong act, never being satisfied, even when the wrong is made definite, "there is some mysterious wrong beyond"; there is the fear of doubt, of not arriving at what is absolutely right and really true. There may be the fear of having committed the unpardonable sin with mysterious communication of unseen powers; fear of eternal damnation; fear of ghosts; fear of remaining alone or clausterphobia; fear of open places or agoraphobia; fear of loss of personality or general vague fear, known as panophobia. A few concrete clinical cases may best bring our these fundamental states of psychoneurosis. I am sorry that my time is limited, and I must make the account of the cases so brief and unsatisfactory.

        I. The patient is a young man of twenty-eight. Family history good. The patient is physically well developed, very able, he is instructor in one of the foremost American institutions. He is obsessed by the fear of loss of personality. The fear is of a periodic character, coming at intervals of two weeks, occasionally disappearing for a few months and even for a few years, but reasserting itself with renewed energy and vigor. During the attack the patient experiences a void, a panic which is sudden in its onset, the patient feels that his self is gone. He can carry on a conversation or a lecture during the attack so that no outsider can notice any change in him, but his self is gone and all he does and says, even the demonstration of a highly complex problem in integral calculus is gone through in an automatic way. The fury of the attack lasts for but a few moments which to him appears of long duration. He is "beside himself," as he puts it. He seems to stand beside himself and watch "the other fellow," as he describes it, carry on the conversation or the lecture. He is knocked out of his body, which carries on automatically all those complicated mental processes. For days after he must keep on thinking of the attack, feels scared and miserable, thinking insistently, in great agony, in a vicious circle over his awful attack.

        At first the patient could trace this attack as far back as his seventh year. Later on earlier experiences of childhood came to light, and then it became clear that the attack developed out of the primitive instinctive fear of early childhood, fears of unfamiliar environment, fear of the dark, fear of strange conditions to which he had been subjected in his tender childhood. The attacks are usually induced by unfamiliar situations; strange conditions, a new location, strange towns, unfrequented places or the noise and bustle of a large unfamiliar city, darkness or loneliness in an unusual quiet place are all conducive to attacks with their intense agony of fear.

        Along with it goes a highly developed sense of the mysterious which dates back to the patient' s early childhood, revolving around the problem, "What am I?" He began to dwell on that problem of "What am I?" since he became conscious of himself as a thinking living personality. This question of "What am I" accompanied with intense fear and anxiety keeps on coming to him in his present attacks. He felt the fear and the overawing mystery of the problem of "What am I?" As the patient puts it: "It is the mystical fear of the attacks which overpowers me." In other words, the patient suffered from the persistent primitive fear of the unfamiliar, and from an over sense of the mysterious. With the disintegration of these states the attacks were the first to disappear and then the general depression of the after-effects gradually faded away.

        III. Patient is a young man of twenty-seven years. His parents, though slightly neurotic, have reached a good old age. Patient is physically well. Since his early childhood, as far back as the age of eight, he suffers from intense melancholic depression, often reaching a state of agony. He is obsessed by the fear of having committed the unpardonable sin. He thinks he is damned to suffer tortures in hell for all eternity. He keeps on testing any chance combinations and if his guesses turn out correct, he is wrought up to a pitch of excitement and panic. For it means to him a communication coming from an unseen world by unknown mysterious powers.

        "The omen testing," he writes in his account to me, "had a monstrous growth. The tests have been concerned with the letters in my reading, with people walking on the street, with carriages and automobiles, fire alarms, sounds of all kinds, the sound of the voice and of birds, hymns in church, the weather, the arrangement of letters in conversation, etc. The general principle has been the same throughout, which is briefly this: If the normal course of events is interfered with in a special way that I arbitrarily arrange in my mind before the happening, I infer, or rather fear, that it is a signal from some extraneous intelligence. As to a signal of what, that also is arbitrarily arranged beforehand. For instance, I considered it was not the normal course of events to be able to predict on what day of the week several people would arrive at the hotel and still I predicted it. I feared either that I had a supernatural power of prediction or that the people themselves were in some supernatural way forced to fall in with the day I predicted."

        The attack proper comes in pulses of brief duration; followed by long periods of brooding, depression, and worry. The primitive fear of pain, of danger and death, and the sense of the mysterious cultivated by his religious training, reached here an extraordinary degree of development almost paranoidal in character. Among the earliest memories that have come up in the hypnoidal state there was the memory of an old woman, a Sunday school teacher, who cultivated in the patient, then but five years of age, those virulent religious germs which, grown on the soil of the primitive instinctive fear and the highly developed sense of the unknown and the mysterious, have brought forth those poisonous fruits which now form the curse of his life.

        Let me read to you another paragraph from the patient's account: "It is difficult to place the beginning of my abnormal fear. It certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly woman who taught Sunday school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if I was not good enough to be saved."

    I can bring many more cases, but these will suffice as illustrations. In all my phobia cases I find as the basis of the morbid condition the primitive instinctive fear of the unknown, of the unfamiliar, a fundamental fear instinct rooted in the impulse of self-preservation, and an over-developed sense of the mysterious. The recognition of these fundamental states by the psychopathologist and their disintegration by treatment are of the utmost importance for psychopathology and psychotherapeutics. The educator may possibly find here some important hints in regard to the bringing up of the young. The Holy Scriptures claim [Greek text], but from our present standpoint we may paraphrase the biblical statement by saying that the fear of the mysterious is the beginning of phobia.

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1. Die Theroie der Psychneurosen behauptet mit ausschliessender Sicherheit (?), das es nur sexuelle Wunschregungen aus dem infantilen sein können welche in den Entwicklungsperioden der Kindheit die Verdrängung (Affectverwandeung) erfahren haben in späteren Entwicklungsperioden dann einer Erneuerung fähig sind, sei es in folge der sexuelle Konstitution, die sich ja aus der ursprünglichen Bisexualität herausbildet sei es in folge un-günstiger Einflüsse des sexuellen Lebens, und die somit die Triebkräfte für alle psychoneurotische Symptombildung abgeben. (S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, p. 376, 2^te Auflage, 1909.)
        In other words, slippery and mutable as Freud's statements are, he clearly declares in the last edition to his magnum opus the far and wide reaching generalization that all psychoneurosis is based on sexual wish-impulses (Wunschregungen) coming from infantile life. Suppression of sexual experiences can be easily observed (by competent observers, of course), in infants of a few months old. If you miss the process of suppression in the baby, you can easily trace it by means of psychoanalysis to the early recollections of tender infancy. It is certainly lack of comprehension that induces Ziehen to daub Freud's speculations as Unsinn.
        Some of Freud's admirers, with a metaphysical proclivity, are delighted over the theory of suppressed wishes. The wish is fundamental and prior to all mental states. This piece of metaphysical psychologism is supposed to be based on clinical experience. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." The Freudist manages to ride such horses.

2. Sovremennaja Psychiatria, May, June, July, 1909.