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An interesting clinical fact is that many epileptic children experience their first seizure following a loss. Soulas investigates this correlation in order to understand psychological factors involved in epilepsy, especially the relationship between epilepsy and the death instinct. He reviews case material from two groups. The first consists of children whose first seizure came after the death of an individual who was an important object. In this group he finds a relationship between hysteria and epilepsy. He emphasizes also the importance of the mother's attitude toward her pregnancy with that child. Soulas develops two hypotheses on the meaning of death to children: one is that the fantasy of nonexistence refers to the child's ideas about what he was and where he was before he was born. This hypothesis, Soulas reminds us, is similar to Ferenczi's notion of epilepsy as a regression to an embryonic state. His second hypothesis on childhood representations of death concerns the importance of sadistic and violent destructive fantasies. Soulas's second group of cases involves children whose parents have experienced the loss of a child. The traumatic factor in these cases is the manner in which the parents react to the loss. Such parents have had difficulty in carrying out the work of mourning. The child may perhaps identify with the mother in this mourning and achieve a violent elaboration of pathological mourning in the form of epileptic seizure. No doubt the youngster has also experienced separation from the mother as traumatic. The initial epileptic seizure is often preceded by a traumatic physical incident. The initiative function of this incident probably comes about by affording the child an experience of a mechanical aggression, indicating to its ego a masochistic pathway for the expression of aggression. Soulas reviews some of the implications of his findings and makes suggestions for further research on the epileptic child, especially on the n