processing and siphoning it off into some form of fantasy for compensation and balance? In the silent pictures of the 1920s a great many of the sequences involved the motorcar and policemen. Since the film was then accepted as an optical illusion, the cop was the principal reminder of the existence of ground rules in the game of fantasy. As such, he took an endless beating. The motorcars of the 1920s look to our eyes like ingenious contraptions hastily assembled in a tool shop. Their link with the buggy was still strong and clear. Then came the balloon tires, the massive interior, and the bulging fenders. Some people see the big car as a sort of bloated middle age, following the gawky period of the first love-affair between America and the car. But funny as the Viennese analysts have been able to get about the car as sex object, they have at last, in so doing, drawn attention to the fact that, like the bees in the plant world, men have always been the sex organs of the technological world. The car is no more and no less a sex object than the wheel or the hammer. What the motivation researchers have missed entirely is the fact that the American sense of spatial form has changed much since radio, and drastically since TV It is misleading, though harmless, to try to grasp this change as middle-age reaching out for the sylph Lolita. Certainly there have been some strenuous slimming programs for the car in recent years. But if one were to ask, "Will the car last?" or "Is the motorcar here to stay?" there would be confusion and doubt at once. Strangely, in so progressive an age, when change has become the only constant in our lives, we never ask, "Is the car here to stay?" The answer, of course, is "No." In the electric age, the wheel itself is obsolescent. At the heart of the car industry there are men who know that the car is passing, as certainly as the cuspidor was doomed when the lady typist arrived on the business scene. What arrangements have they made to ease the automobile industry off the center of the stage?