Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

The trouble is that fear has a great tendency to function to excess, especially in the years of childhood, that formative period which means so much to future development. There is scarcely one of us who, looking back, cannot recall some youthful fear, abnormal in its intensity. Nor are such abnormal fears confined to the young. With many people they persist in one form or another throughout life; it may be as fear of thunder, fear of mice, fear of snakes. Moreover, they sometimes do not appear with full force until the period of youth is long past. At the age of thirty or forty—at any age—there may develop, with irresistible power, and seemingly for no reason, a paralysing, appalling fear of doing some trivial, everyday act, or of coming into contact with some familiar and entirely harmless object. When fear becomes as extreme as this it amounts to a disease, and is recognised as such by the medical profession, being technically known as a “phobia.” It is through scientific study of these phobias, as recently carried out by medical specialists with a psychological training, that full realisation has been gained of the tremendous rôle played by fear in the life of man, and the need for its proper control and direction.

The two commonest phobias are direct opposites of one another—namely, fear of open places (agoraphobia) and fear of being in a closed place (claustrophobia). The victim of agoraphobia can with difficulty be persuaded to trust himself outdoors. He fears that if he goes out some catastrophe will overwhelm him. His state of mind is one of absolute panic, and when obliged to cross any open space, such as a public park, he displays all the symptoms of extreme fear. The person troubled with abnormal fear of closed places experiences no difficulty of this sort. He is, on the contrary, never so happy as when in the open. His troubles begin when he is asked to take, say, a drive in a cab or a journey in a railway car. He dare not attend the theatre, or any indoor public entertainment. Whence comes his aversion from closed places he cannot say. He only knows that the mere thought of being in any place from which he cannot escape at a moment’s notice fills him with a torturing dread.

In accounting for phobias like these psychologists have, as a usual thing, fallen back on pure theory, and—especially when strongly influenced by the evolutionary doctrine—have been wont to attribute them to the emergence of ancestral traits and instincts once of real biological value. But recent investigation has made it certain that this ancestral revival theory is both superfluous and erroneous, and tends to hinder rather than help an understanding of the mechanism and consequences of fear. For one thing, there is the fact that agoraphobia and claustrophobia are not the only irrational fears. There may be a phobia for any conceivable act or object, and to explain all these in terms of the revival of ancestral instincts is surely beyond the power of the most vivid scientific imagination. Further than this, so far as abnormal fear of open or closed spaces is concerned, the researches of the medical specialists have rendered possible a satisfactory explanation—and an explanation that has much practical value—without harking back to the feelings and doings of primitive man.

It has been found in every case scientifically studied that there is indeed a memory revival of past experiences, but that it is invariably a revival of experiences in the life of the victim himself, not of his remote ancestors. This is true of every kind of phobia. The sufferer may honestly declare his inability to recall any antecedent happening of a fear-inducing character. But it is found that, subconsciously at any rate, he always carries with him a vivid memory-image of some occurrence that at the time shocked him greatly; and that his phobia is due to the ceaseless presentation in his subconsciousness of this vivid memory-image. In proof of which may be cited the experiences of any medical man accustomed, in treating patients for nervous and mental troubles, to make use of modern methods—hypnotism, hynoidisation, and so forth—for exploring the obscurer workings of the human mind.

Take, by way of illustration, a case of abnormal fear of open places successfully treated by Doctor Isador H. Coriat, a Boston neurologist of my acquaintance. The patient was a young man who for nearly two years had been tormented by an irrational fear of fields, parks, and public squares. His relatives and friends had argued with him, he had tried to conquer the phobia by force of will, but all to no purpose. Nor could he give any reason for his abnormal dread.

Put into the hypnotic state, however, and questioned again, he recalled an incident that at once revealed its source. Two years previously, it appeared, he had been taking a horseback ride, when he unexpectedly galloped into an open field.

“I became terribly frightened,” said he, “as the ground was rough, and I thought I should certainly fall off the horse. I felt faint, my heart beat rapidly, I broke into a cold perspiration and trembled all over. It seemed as if the end of the world was coming. Since then, whenever I see a field or a park I am reminded of this, and feel the same agonising fear.”

In the case of another patient suffering from fear of closed spaces the abnormal fear was traced to an occasion when, visiting a friend in a small, close room, the patient had a fainting attack. In a third patient, a young woman, there developed a fear of crowds because, some time previously, at a crowded school celebration, she had been slightly overcome by heat, and had “felt like screaming.” Another young woman was afflicted with pyrophobia, or fear of fire, in such an extreme form that she could not remain in a room where an open fire was burning, and every night made the rounds of her house to satisfy herself there was nothing that could start a conflagration. Inquiry showed that all this morbid anxiety was an outgrowth of a previous experience with fire.

Sometimes memory of the antecedent causal experience is not entirely blotted out of the upper consciousness. The sufferer may even entertain a clear recollection of it and still be unable to conquer his phobia; which, however, under these circumstances is not nearly so severe as when the process is entirely one of subconscious mentation. In either case, of course, the problem of the development of the phobia still requires explanation. Only partial enlightenment is gained, after all, when we recognise the causal action of some specific occurrence, such as a fall, a fainting-fit, or the sight of a fire. Thousands of persons experience these things without thereby becoming victims of a phobia. When a phobia does result, some exceptional circumstances must be operative, and it is manifestly desirable to learn, if possible, what these are.