It helps to know 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.

=Breaking the Spell.= When once we bring up into consciousness these hidden desires that manifest themselves in such troublesome ways, we find that we have robbed them of much of their power over our lives.  Sometimes, it is true, a detailed and thorough exploration by psycho-analysis is necessary, but in many cases it is sufficient just to know that there are underlying causes.  To know these things is far from excusing ourselves because of them.  Even though emotions are determined by forces that are deep in the subconscious,