1Re-examination of the classic formulation of claustrophobia indicates the importance of anal and oral elements in addition to castration anxiety. Fears of being squeezed out of mother as feces or of being fused with mother are prominent in those phobias resistant to analysis of the oedipal conflict.

2Claustrophobia is shown to have several areas of similarity to depression. Both are presented as specific reactions to the threatened loss of an object. The concept of an ambivalent introject inside the self, in contrast to the concept of the self inside a threatening claustrum, are variants of a related fantasy. Such a substitution of object for self representations is shown to be derived from early "primal cavity" memory traces, and may be due to a developmental failure of the ego to maintain a stable cathexis of an intact self representation in the face of threatened object loss.