In a recent publication[17] Freud has made the striking suggestion that the developed dread sometimes found in situations of real danger is derived, not from the repressed sexual hunger that is directed towards external objects, as is the case with morbid anxiety of the peace neuroses, but from the narcissistic part of the sexual hunger that is attached to the ego, and I venture to suggest that we may here have the key to the states of terror with which we are so familiar in the war neuroses. The psycho-analytic investigations of recent years have laid increasing stress on the distinction between “object-libido”, the sexual impulses that are directed outwards, and the “ego-libido”, the narcissistic portion that is directed inwards and constitutes self-love. There is good reason to suppose that the latter is the more primary of the two, and also the more extensive—though the least explored as yet—so that it constitutes, as it were, a well from which externally directed sexuality is but on overflow. The analogy naturally occurs to one of the protoplasmic outpourings in the pseudopodia of the amœba, and the reciprocal relation of these to the main body seems to be similar to that between love of others and self-love. It has been known for some time that there is a limit on the part of the organism to tolerate without suffering more than a given quantity of sexual hunger in its familiar sense of impulses directed outwards, and analytic study of the psychoses, notably of paraphrenia, has shewn that the same is even more profoundly true of the narcissistic sexual hunger. In both cases, before other symptoms are formed so as to deal with the energies in question and bind them, the first thing that happens is a discharge in the form of morbid anxiety, so that we reach the comforting conclusion that a normal man would be entirely free from dread in the presence of any danger, however imminent, that he would be as fearless as Siegfried; it is a gratifying thought that there seem to be many such in our Army to-day. It seems to me probable that the intolerance of narcissistic sexual hunger which leads to dread in the presence of real danger is to be correlated with the inhibition of the other manifestations of the fear instinct, with the accumulated tension characteristic of the mode of life in the trenches.