“Phobia particularises anxiety,” observes the literary scholar David Trotter, “to the point at which it can be felt and known in its particularity, and thus counteracted or got around.” Evolutionary psychologists argue that many phobias are adaptive: our fears of heights and snakes are hardwired in our brains to prevent us from falling from heights or being bitten by snakes our disgust at rats protects us from disease. Freud proposed that a phobia was a suppressed dread or desire displaced on to an external object. We can become phobic after a shock, or just by witnessing the fear of others. The causes of these conditions are disputed. Some terrors are no sooner imagined than felt. When I began researching the subject, I did not think of myself as having any particular phobias – apart, perhaps, from my teenage dread of blushing and an enduring anxiety about flying – but by the time I’d finished I had talked myself into almost every one. Hanging by a thread: many buildings in East Asia skip all floor and room numbers that include four. They identified dozens of irrational fears, among them fears of public spaces, small spaces, blushing and being buried alive (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, erythrophobia, taphephobia). They came to see phobias as lurid traces of our evolutionary and personal histories, manifestations both of animal instincts and of desires that we had repressed. Over the next century, psychiatrists developed a more complex understanding of these traits. “I shall define phobia to be a fear of an imaginary evil,” he wrote, “or an undue fear of a real one.” He listed 18 phobias, among them terrors of dirt, ghosts, doctors and rats. Until then, the word “phobia” (which is derived from Phobos, the Greek god of panic and terror) had been applied only to symptoms of physical disease, but Rush used it to describe psychological phenomena. The American physician Benjamin Rush kicked off the craze for naming such fixations in 1786. W e are all driven by our fears and desires, and sometimes we are in thrall to them.
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