Many years ago Simmel ascribed a specific importance to an intestinal libidinal cathexis, attempting to adduce the evidence from deep analyses, from states of excitement over the whole length of gut and from theory. The author going further postulates a pre-oral respiratory-intestinal stage of libido development beginning at birth, accounting for the anxiety of suffocation and the pleasure in this anxiety which may sometimes occur. Fenichel and Külövesi worked on the notion of respiratory introjection shewing its rôle in the development of object relationships and in regression, anxiety about death and suffocation being a transposition from oral introjection to respiratory. The conversion phenomena of this phase are asthma and mucous colitis (called by v. Bergman 'bowel asthma'). The last third of the paper ends 'bioanalytically' with reference to Ferenczi's 'Genitaltheorie'.