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From their experience with eight cases the authors outline the dynamics and therapy of school phobia. This is a neurotic syndrome occurring in children, characterized by intense fear of school, running home to the mother, and hysterical or obsessive symptoms which vary from case to case. The early neurotic groundwork is formed by a poor resolution of the child's dependence on his mother who, in turn, has never adequately solved her conflicts with her own mother. The acute phobia breaks out when organic disease or emotional conflict creates an acute anxiety in the child which happens to be concurrent with an increase of anxiety in the mother due to some conflict of her own. Both mother and child then regress to the early dependency situation, and a vicious cycle begins in which dependent wishes, hostility, guilt, and restitution increase in both mother and child, binding them ever more firmly together in a mutually ambivalent deadlock. The phobia serves primarily as a defense: the child's guilty rage at the mother is displaced onto a phobic object, the teacher. By means of his symptom the child also punishes both his mother and himself, his mother through the neighborhood criticism aroused by his neurosis, and himself by his failure in school and through the ridicule of other children. The father does not play an important rôle in this syndrome except as his neurosis increases the mother's anxiety. In the present series both mother and child were treated in every instance by separate psychotherapists. In seven of the eight cases the child returned to school within five months to one year. School phobia clearly demonstrates the interdigitation between the conflicts of the parent and those of the child. Such an interrelationship is present, though less obvious, in every neurosis of childhood, and indicates the necessity for treating all the participants in the conflict situation if any one of them is to be really benefited.