ABSTRACT
Those who have investigated the psychogenesis of locomotor anxiety with the help of Freudian methods have regularly met with certain factors operating in the formation of this trouble, so that they have been bound to regard them as typical for that illness. They were, of course, well aware that the neurotic who needs the constant company of particular persons shows the incestuous fixation of his libido in a particularly marked degree, and that every attempt he makes to separate himself from his love-object signifies in his unconscious an attempt to detach his libido from it. They have recognized, furthermore, that the anxiety such a person feels causes him suffering on the one hand, but, on the other, enables him to exert his power over the persons about him. Further typical determinants of his‘ topophobia’ are the subject’s fear of life—symbolically represented by streets—and in particular, his fear of the temptations which beset him as soon as he leaves the protection of his parental home. There is also his dread of death which might overtake him unawares when he is away from the people he loves.
