Five case histories of children between two and a half and sixteen years of age (with anxiety symptoms, hysteria, severe eating inhibition, mental defect and paranoid dementia) illustrate the mechanisms of symptom formation, with special reference to anxiety, conversion and obsessional symptoms, persecutory ideas, general inhibition, 'naughtiness' and character difficulties. Analytic material derived from adults who suffered in childhood from these symptoms shews the relation of these to later development.