II.
To draw a distinction between the normal and morbid forms of fear is a task which, at first sight, might appear tolerably difficult. We have, however, a criterion to guide us. Every form of fear which, instead of being useful, becomes hurtful, which, ceasing to be a means of protection, becomes a means of destruction, is pathological. We have already (Part I., chap. iv.) indicated the marks which enable us to discriminate between the healthy and the morbid; I recall them once more.
Morbid emotion presents one or more of the following characteristics: it is apparently disproportionate to its cause; it is chronic; its physical accompaniments are of extraordinary intensity.
On the question of morbid fears, now known by the name of phobias, there exists a great mass of observations, notes, and papers, which is increasing day by day, and contains far more enumerations and descriptions than attempts at explanation. J. Falret and Westphal (in his essay on agoraphobia, 1872) seem to be the first who have entered on this path. To Westphal’s fear of open spaces and Falret’s fear of contact may be added many others; and we pass through a first period, where we find a veritable deluge of phobias, each having its special name; one person fears needles, another glass, one low places, another high places, one water, another fire, etc. Every morbid manifestation of fear is immediately fitted with a Greek designation, or one so reputed, and we have aïcmophobia, belenophobia, thalassophobia, potamophobia, etc., even siderodromophobia (the fear of railways) and triakaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13!). The list of these phobias would fill pages, and it is clear that there is no reason why it should ever stop; all the objects in creation might be included in it, if clothed in pseudo-Greek garb.
Accordingly, a reaction has taken place. Instead of, as was at first done, considering each phobia separately, naming it after its object, and so losing one’s self in endless varieties, the tendency now is to regard them only as individual cases of a general morbid disposition, whose essential psychological characteristics are a fixed idea or obsession, and symptoms of fear sometimes reaching the dimensions of a paroxysm, and expressing themselves in convulsions and hysterical attacks.
Several classifications have been proposed, with a view to introducing some order into this multiplicity. Some proceed subjectively, classifying according to the sensations, perceptions, images, ideas, or feelings which form the basis of the fear. Thus the fear of contact is connected with touch, agoraphobia with sight, and so on. Others proceed objectively; Régis proposes five groups: (1) the fear of inanimate objects; (2) of living beings (fear of crowds, solitude, inoffensive animals); (3) of spaces (agoraphobia, claustrophobia); (4) of meteorological phenomena; (5) of illness (nosophobia, with its very numerous varieties). To be accurate, these classifications, though they may be useful to the clinical lecturer, are of no great advantage to the psychology of fear; the interesting problem lies elsewhere.
Before reaching this, let us remark that, apart from any particular fears, there exist some observations on a vague but permanent state of anxiety or terror, which has been called panphobia, or pantophobia (Beard). This is a state in which the patient fears everything or nothing, where anxiety, instead of being riveted on one object, floats as in a dream, and only becomes fixed for an instant at a time, passing from one object to another, as circumstances may determine.
If, leaving aside the endless enumeration of the kinds of fear and their description, we seek—for this is the task incumbent on psychology—to determine their derivation from normal fear, and the causes which excite them, we enter an almost unexplored region and pass from riches to indigence.
As far as concerns their psychological origin, i.e., the determination of the normal type from which they are deviations, I propose reducing them to two groups.
The first is directly connected with fear, and includes all manifestations implying in any degree whatever the fear of pain, from that of a fall or the prick of a needle to that of illness or death. The second is directly connected with disgust, and seems to me to include the forms which have sometimes been called pseudophobia (Gélineau). Such are the fear of contact, the horror of blood, and of innocuous animals, and many strange and causeless aversions.
Let us remark, furthermore, that fear and disgust have a common basis, being both instruments of protection or defence. The first is the defensive-conservative instinct of the relative life, the second the defensive-conservative instinct of the organic life. As both have a common basis of aversion, they show themselves in equivalent ways: fear by withdrawal, departure, flight; disgust by vomiting or nausea. The reflexes of disgust are the succedanea of flight; the organism cannot escape by movement in space from the repugnant body which it has taken into itself, and goes through a movement of expulsion instead.
After having traced back all morbid fears to two sources—which may indeed be reduced to one—we have to seek for their causes. One very general cause, with which most authors content themselves, is degeneracy. I shall speak of this elsewhere (see [Conclusion]); but as it is constantly brought in to explain the most dissimilar manifestations, it assumes such a general character that it becomes necessary to supplement it. Let us then, if any importance is attached to this, assume degeneracy as the soil on which morbid fears spring up and multiply; then let us seek the complementary causes, which are less vague and nearer to the facts. I would propose three such.
1. The cause is in some event of a man’s previous life of which he retains the recollection. For example: A man walking on a terrace on the top of his house failed to perceive that the balustrade was missing at one spot; he was walking backwards, and would have fallen over the edge had he not been stopped; he contracted permanent agoraphobia.[[137]] A morbid fear of railways is frequently found in overworked engineers, and especially in men who have narrowly escaped with their lives in a railway accident. The well-known case of Pascal seeing an abyss at his left side, which prevented him from walking forward unless some one held him by the hand, or a chair was placed for him to lean on, was a consequence of his accident at the bridge of Neuilly. It is also said that Peter the Great, having been nearly drowned when a child, felt, on passing a bridge, a fear which he had some difficulty in overcoming.
We can easily see that many phobias come under this category. Now, the cause here is only the exaggeration of a normal fact. Every serious accident leaves behind it a recollection, which, for some, is merely a bald record of the event and the circumstances (intellectual memory), for others, a revival in some degree of the fear formerly experienced (emotional memory); for “phobic” subjects it is (at least potentially) a permanent state, ready to arise when suggested by some association.[[138]]
2. Some morbid fears have their origin in occurrences of childhood of which no recollection has been retained. When appealing to the unconscious memory, we place ourselves in a fatally unfavourable position; we enter the domain of the obscure and hypothetical, and lay ourselves open to criticism of all sorts, all the more so as some writers have made an excessive use of the explanation by the unconscious. A minute inquiry into each particular case would be needed. If, however, this hypothesis is difficult to justify by means of positive proof, the part played by the unconscious in psychic life, and particularly with regard to the memory, is so incontestable that we may legitimately admit its sure though secret action. Perhaps those who are seized by strange fears might, if they questioned themselves, discover the cause in some past occurrence. Here, at least, is a case which I give as typical of this group. Mosso asked a soldier, aged seventy, what he had been most afraid of in his life, and the man’s reply was, “I have been face to face with death in many battles; but I am never so frightened as when I come across a lonely chapel in a remote part of the mountains; because, when quite a child, I once saw in such a place the corpse of a murdered man, and a maidservant wished to shut me up with it as a punishment.”[[139]] Supposing the conscious recollection to be gradually effaced with years, the impression might well remain indelible, though latent, becoming active under given circumstances. Is it rash to say that there are many cases of this kind, with this difference, that the traces leading back to the original cause have vanished?
Cases of strange and insurmountable fear or antipathy have been noticed in some celebrated men: Scaliger was seized with nervous trembling at the sight of water-cress, Bacon fainted during eclipses, Bayle at the sound of running water, James I. at the sight of a naked sword (Morel). Among average human beings many like cases occur, but never become known, for lack of biographers to record them. I am inclined to think that there lies at the root of them some impression of early childhood, embedded in the constitution of the individual, and originating a repulsive tendency which acts as though it were natural.
3. The morbid fear may be the result of the occasional passage of a vague and indeterminate state into a precise form. Panphobia, mentioned above, might be a preparatory stage, an undifferentiated period, to which chance, a sudden shock, for instance, may give a direction and fix it, as in the fear of epidemics, of microbes, of hydrophobia, etc. This is the passage from a diffused emotional state to the intellectualised state, i.e., one concentrated and embodied in a fixed idea: an analogous process to that of the “delusions of persecution,” in which the suspicion, at first vague, attaches itself to an individual and will not be diverted from him. The cases, much less frequent than others, in which several distinct fears coexist, seem to me to be distinguished from this group. In short, the true cause is a general state (an emotive condition of fear), but chance plays a great part in it.
I do not pretend to explain everything by means of these three kinds of causes. When we come to examine the legion of morbid fears we are often greatly embarrassed by cases which refuse to come under any of the rules. Here is a well-known and very trite one: the sight of blood producing malaise or even syncope. This is inexplicable by reason, since the blood is the life; but reason has nothing to do with the matter. Let us seek elsewhere. It might be said that blood recalls violent pain, destruction, slaughter; but its sight affects children who can have no such recollections. Some have tried to explain it by constitutional weakness or nervousness, but syncope sometimes takes place in very vigorous subjects,[[140]] while neuropaths remain unaffected. Heredity has been called in, but I fail to see what it explains, for, going back from generation to generation, we must come at last to the primitive men, fighters who were not afraid of blood. Many other explanations might be proposed, which might be met by other criticisms.
I have cited this single fact in order to show that, so soon as we pass beyond the enumeration and description of morbid fears, and try to trace their origin, we enter on a part of the subject which is almost untouched.
CHAPTER III.
ANGER.
Anger the conservative instinct in its offensive form—Physiology—Psychology—Anger passes through two stages, one simple, the other mixed—Its evolution—Animal form, or that of actual aggression—Emotional form, or that of simulated aggression—Appearance of a pleasurable element—Intellectualised form, or that of deferred aggression—Pathology: Epileptic insanity, corresponding to the animal form; the maniacal state, corresponding to the affective form—Disintegrated forms of anger—Overpowering tendencies to destructiveness—How do they arise and take a definite direction?—Return to the reflex state—Essential cause: temperament—Accidental causes.