Fliess believes that certain patients exploit the residual hypnotic characteristics of the psycho-analytic situation as a resistance. The patients he describes were all marked in ordinary life not only by a tendency to hypnotic responses but by an intense unconscious need for punishment. When they used this escape from analysis, sometimes very transitorily, it was into the first degree of hypnosis—a state often difficult to detect but accompanied by an experience of lassitude. This evasion was designed to counteract the mobilization of forbidden impulses by paralysis, and its detection was on occasion indispensable to their successful analysis. The patients' reaction to the analyst as hypnotist proves to be the ego's reaction to the superego projected upon the analyst: its metapsychology and relation to the archaic past of the species are discussed.