Zilboorg attempts to raise the question of the objective data, etc., which may exist so that we may suspect the possibility of suicide before the act is committed. He reviews various ideas of Freud on the subject of depression and suicide and then gives eight cases of attempted or successful suicide and discusses them. He stresses that others besides depressives attempt suicide. Some of his cases were typically obsessional neurotics. Here he found that killing out of motives of spite was of considerable importance. Another group of cases shows that identification with a hated person who died when the patient was at a crucial age, i.e. late infancy or puberty, seems to be conducive to self-destruction. The universality of the drive and its outstanding characteristics lead him to believe that some archaic response to inner conflict is at work and that possibly an ethnologic study would be fruitful.