I went upstairs to see the patient. She poured out to me one of the most pitiful stories I ever heard—the same story just given, but from her own point of view. So far as she could see, her friends were all playing her false in some way, or losing their affection for her. She knew that it was not by accident that one friend after another had politely shown her the door. Something was being concealed from her. What could it be? She was really worn out, she said with worry and sorrow about it.
I told her at once the whole truth. I told her that she was insane. I could also tell her truthfully that she would come out of it (as she did), but that I must now take her away from this house, shut her up, and take care of her. "Oh," she said, with immense relief in her voice, "is that all? Is it nothing worse than that? Insanity is nothing compared to losing all your friends." Insanity is one of the greatest of human fears, but for this old lady, as for most of us, there is something still worse—the fear that one has not a friend in the world. Even to know that she was doomed to what most people would consider one of the worst of fates was to her a relief; for there was a worse fear in reserve, and that she now knew was groundless.
The treatment of fears, the only treatment that I know of, is that we face them, look straight at them, as we turn a skittish horse's head right towards the thing that he is going to shy at, so he can look at it squarely. So we try to turn the person's mental gaze straight upon the thing that he fears.
People frequently consult a doctor because they are afraid of fainting, fainting in church or in the street, for example. In such cases I have found it most effective to say, "Well, suppose you do—what harm will it do?" From the answers to this question I find generally that the patients have in the back of their minds, unconfessed, unrealized, the fear that if they faint and nothing adequate is done to cure them they will die. They do not know that people who faint come to just as well if they are let alone, and that all the fussing about that is usual when people faint is useful merely to keep the bystanders busy and not to revive the patient.
Make a person face "the worst" and you disarm its terrors.
"But suppose I get faint on the street?"
"Well, you probably will just sit down on the curbstone until you come to."
That remark does not sound as if it would reassure a person even if made with a laugh. But it does, because he is thereby freed of a fear of something much worse, a fear that lurks in the background of his mind.
There is one other thing to be said about the treatment of fears. If a person fears to do any particular act, such as going to church or into the subway, if he fears to be alone in crossing a big square, if he fears to get into a crowd (all these are common fears), the most important thing is to force him to do what he most fears.