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murder the 'suitability' of the stones to serve the ambivalent crowd as a weapon in the battle against the sacred primal father. Perhaps it would be less superficial to interpret the choice of the stones as symbols of the lost virility; since other points of support for the theory do not exist, speculation may set in at this point. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which must have occurred frequently and over wide areas at this period may serve as a connecting link. The impression of such catastrophes on the sur- vivors was perhaps re-inforced by inherited premonitions which the tribal fathers of the human animal acquired in the days be- fore the prehistoric times of humanity. (Consider, for example, the drying up of the marine animals cited by Ferenczi.) Accord- ingly, taking everything into consideration, the horde might have been following the example of Nature in covering the father with stones, while later, oppressed by the sense of guilt, it might in its myths have projected back the deed on to Nature as it were. Then indeed the manifest content of these myths might have been right, in as much as the burying stones moved 'by them- selves'. The speaker compared, as Freud has already done, the repression with the burying under stones (Verschuttung^ In so far as the repression (in the sense of the withdrawal of cathexis and anti-cathexis) has developed in the mind as a result of this crime, the origin of the repression would become intelligible as the intrapsychic repetition of the hberating act dealing with its memory, or perhaps as the psychic imprint of a geophysical pro- cess, and behind the analogy drawn by Freud and R6heim a piece of evolutionary truth would be revealed. The latter consideration presupposes furthermore that the phylogenetic preparatory phase of the repression was the hasty withdrawal of the cathexis; the evolution towards (primal) repression was accomplished — correspond- ing with the increasing differentiation of mental life — by the develop- ment of the faculty of being able to turn the withdrawn quantity of cathexis (cf above lost virility) into an effective anti-cathexis.

October 22, ip2i. Dr. Pfeifer: Problems of the Psychology of Music in the Light of Psych o-Analysis. ist part: The Psycho-physio- logy of Musical Sound.

The speaker establishes the following theory concerning musical sound and its agreeable impression, basing his doctrine on biolog- ical and evolutionary fact as well as on psycho-analytical experience with the currents and the developmental stages of the Ubido;