The relatively unrelieved mediocrity in Conrad's work during his later years is linked with his inability to deal with the subject of love. It is suggested that the devices used by him with such success earlier in his career served to maintain a distance between his personal psychosexual conflicts and his art and were not available later. Further, his creative writing suffered during domestic stress, especially his reaction to his wife's pregnancies.

Attention is paid to the shift in the psychological and moral orientation implicit in the stories of his later years. The change involves a replacement of an outer conflict (in his earlier writing) for an inner conflict later. The author believes that the profound change in Conrad's emotional makeup that affected his creative writing adversely was partially due to the development of a psychosis in 1909 precipitated by an 'infectious-toxic' process. The underlying