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During a very short period of time after hatching, young birds of certain species may exhibit a pattern of imprinting in which they follow after the mother or, in the absence of the parent at a critical time, after any large moving object available to them. Thereafter the attachment to the parent bird or substitute object is practically irreversible. Coupled with this 'following response' is a conflicting tendency to flee from the object, an initial ambivalence that is ordinarily resolved in favor of the stronger following impulse as stimulated by the presence of the mother. If 'following' is not established due to her absence, then fleeing predominates. This early tendency to flee is a significant behavioral phenomenon that may deserve equal consideration with sexuality and aggression rather than being relegated to the class of a second-order defense. Animal studies indicate that all three are built into the organism, evocable in response to specific causation. Their concurrence produces conflict which the animal may attempt to resolve by any one of several reactions whose similarity to human patterns is obvious: immobility or 'freezing'; inhibition of all but one activity; the appearance of initiative movements without pattern completion, compromise alternations between tendencies, ambivalent posture expressive of antithetic tendencies, displacement to inappropriate behavior, and regression to infantile behavior. The timing or duration of the conflict and the occurrence of a pattern under circumstances of deprivation may, independently or together, produce a fixation wherein the animal continues to exhibit the pattern after the external situation has changed to the extent that it no longer warrants the response. These data can be transposed to human application only with caution but they have important implications for the development of attachment to the mother by the human neonate. From the ethological standpoint the mother, in relationship to whom so