The critics have adopted strangely contradictory attitudes towards Cézanne's portrayal of mass and depth. Perhaps there was an ambiguity in Cézanne's own vision to account for this. There is evidence that he suffered from a severe scoptophilic conflict. The author knows of a painter whose difficulty in delineating perspective was due to a scoptophilic fear, and it is therefore conceivable that its ambiguous treatment by Cézanne was also due to one. If so, then his concentration on his sensations rather than the object, his disregard of real forms, and his technique of laying on pigment in such a way as to pull the attention continually back and forth be-between surface and depth would all be well suited to maintain detachment in looking and thus minimize such an anxiety. Perhaps one might speculate that this technique also diminishes the observer's anxiety, enabling him to look more intensely.