1. Cautionary example 2. Criterion for essential self-adjointness 3. Examples of essentially self-adjoint operators 4. Appendix: Friedrichs' canonical self-adjoint extensions 5. The following has been well understood for 70-120 years, or longer, naturally not in contemporary terminology. The differential operator T = d 2 dx 2 on L 2 [a, b] or L 2 (R) is a prototypical natural unbounded operator...