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Animals manifest an instinctual flight reaction which is as dependent on specific 'key stimuli' as are sexual and the maternal reactions. The outline of the body of a bird with outspread wings evokes fear and flight in most birds if the projection representing the head (in a real bird or an experimental dummy) protrudes only a little; most birds of prey are short-necked. This is a specific response to a specific detail: the other parts of the outline of the bird's or dummy's body are of far less consequence. There are many such reactions in which the animal responds blindly to only one part of the total situation and neglects other parts that its sensory organs perceive. This phenomenon is compared with the behavior of several patients who were filled with anguished fright by the fantasy of seeing the analyst full-faced—specifically of seeing his two eyes and forehead. Neither the profile view nor the fullface with one eye covered produced any such terror. This symptom is apparently a residue of the first months of life, in which it appears that the gestalt perception of 'two eyes and forehead' releases anxiety, whereas the other features play no important part. Unlike animals, however, man reacts with fear to his own species with an archaic, phylogenetic object anxiety. The first smile of the infant, in its second three months of life, is the first mastery of this fear.