The etiology and treatment of lifelong, severe enuresis was studied in a group of children whose mean age was 10 years, drawn from an enuresis clinic in a pediatric hospital. While the enuretic group was found to include more emotionally disturbed children than the nonenuretic sibling controls, the majority of the enuretic patients were probably psychiatrically normal. Neither did they appear to exhibit a general disorder of sensorimotor functioning which might have interfered with their acquisition of nocturnal continence. A 4 month controlled treatment trial showed that the bedbuzzer or conditioning treatment, though producing a cure rate of only 30 per cent, is significantly superior to brief psychotherapy and spontaneous remission, though the latter two do not differ in end result. In many cases no reason for the failure of the conditioning treatment could be established.