that persistent anxiety, lacking obvious cause, is
found to be the anxiety of the thwarted instinct of reproduction. When
the sex-instinct is repeatedly stimulated and then checked it sets in
motion some of the same glands that are activated in fear. What comes
up into consciousness is therefore very naturally a fear or dread of
impending disaster, very like the poignant anxiety that one feels
when stepping up in the dark to a step that is not there.

Simultaneous with the fear lest these repressed desires should not be
satisfied, there is an intense fear lest they should. The more
insistent the repressed desire, and the more it seems likely to break
through into consciousness, the keener the anguish of the ethical
impulses. Abnormal fear, however it may seem to be externalized,
always implies at the bottom a fear of something within. There is no
truth which is harder to believe on first hearing but which grows more
compelling with further knowledge, than this truth that an exaggerated
fear always implies a desire which somehow offends the total
personality. When we observe the various distressing phobias, such as
the common fear of contamination, a woman's fear to undress at night,
a fear that the gas was not turned off, or that one's clothing is out
of order; fear lest the exact truth has not been told, or that the
uttermost farthing of one's obligations has not been met,--then we may
know that there is something in the fear situation which either
directly or symbolically refers to some hidden desire; a desire which
the individual would not for the world acknowledge to himself, but
which is too keen to be altogether repressed.

The close connection between fear and desire is often shown in the
unfounded fear of having committed a crime. Both doctors and lawyers
in their professional work occasionally come upon individuals who
believe that they have committed some heinous crime of which they are
really innocent, and who insist upon their guilt despite all evidence
to the contrary. A quiet, gentle youth who at the age of twenty was
under my medical care, is still not sure in his own whether he, at
twelve years of age, was the burglar who broke into the village store
and killed the owner. It is difficult for the normally self-satisfied
individual to understand the appeal of heroics to a person whose
starved instinct of self-assertion makes him choose to be known as a
villain rather than not to be known at all.

=Break