DISCOVERY 



15 



Irrational Fears 



By F. A. Hampton, M.C., MB. 



Fear, with its accompanying instincts of flight and 

 conceahnent, is primarily a self-protective measure 

 called out by the presence, or even more strongly by 

 the approach, of danger. The attendant physical 

 reactions, the quickened heart-beat, the deepened 

 respirations, the sweating, and the increased tension of 

 the muscles are preparations for the activity of flight, 

 and, if our hair does not commonly stand on end, there 

 are many who have experienced during the late war 

 a certain uncomfortable feeling of tightness in the 

 scalp which is equivalent to the raised hackles with 

 which the cat or dog seeks to magnify his stature and 

 inspire his enemy with the terror that he is probably 

 feeling himself. Besides the impulse to flight, there is 

 also a passive aspect to fear in which the individual 

 becomes paralysed with terror ; and this seems to be 

 the last extremity of fear, evoked usually m the face 

 of overwhelming danger and corresponding to the 

 reaction of shamming dead which is found in many of 

 the lower animals. 



The mental state, disagreeable though it be, also 

 contributes to the scheme of protection, for it is one 

 of intense awareness and alertness, an attitude ex- 

 pressed, it may be noted, by the roots of the word 

 " apprehensive." As George Borrow said, " the eyes 

 of fear are marvellously keen." 



Both the mental and physical phenomena of fear 

 may therefore be looked upon as reactions on the part 

 of the organism to cope with a danger threatening it 

 from without, but there are fears in which these 

 reactions seem to have little or no protective value, 

 for the exciting cause either contains no element of 

 danger, or so little that the emotion evoked is alto- 

 gether disproportionate, and we are tempted to call 

 these fears baseless or irrational. But if we examine 

 them carefully, we find that, however bizarre they 

 may seem, they are nevertheless the result of a con- 

 nected and logical train of thought ; the logic, it is 

 true, may be childish logic, and such as the conscious 

 mind would reject if it were able to criticise it, but 

 the sufferer is unaware of the lines along which the 

 fear is formulated and only receives the end-result of 

 the process, so that the dread appears as an isolated 

 phenomenon, inexplicable and mysterious. 



Such fears are common enough to have been felt 

 at some time by most people, and they do not, of 

 course, connote any essential timidity of character, for 

 there are few who cannot discover in themselves some 

 private and particular fear, though out of self-regard 

 it is often minimised as a mere aversion or antipathy. 

 Many such fears stand out by their seeming incongruity 



with the rest of the character, and when they occur 

 in great men we note and seem to prize them as a 

 spot of weakness that marks the kinship of the hero 

 with our common humanity. Grettir, the Saga hero, 

 was afraid of the dark, Nelson was afraid of horses, 

 and Napoleon of a cat. 



While these fears are trivial enough in their effect 

 to pass for mere eccentricities, yet they grade imper- 

 ceptibly into neurotic conditions where life is made 

 unbearable by fears that the victim realises to be 

 irrational but cannot overcome by any exercise of will 

 or reason. It is more especially to these fears, and 

 for their relief, that the modem advances in psychology 

 have been applied, but the disco\-cr!es made in this 

 sphere illuminate equally those smaller fears of every- 

 day life that we have hitherto accepted as capricious 

 and inexplicable. These fears may be arranged, for 

 purpose of description, in three groups : (i) Those of 

 which the exciting cause seems to lie in some forgotten 

 fright or shock, usually occurring in childhood ; 

 (2) those cases in which detailed investigation dis- 

 covers the presence of a hidden fear, whose existence 

 the individual is unwilhng to admit to himself and of 

 which he contrives, by a purely unconscious and 

 apparently effortless process, to remain unaware ; 

 {3) those cases in which the fear is found to sei-v-e as 

 the protection against the fulfilment of a hidden wish 

 or desire. 



As an example in the first group we may take the 

 case of a person who was acutely afraid of stagnant 

 water, but not (though he was unable to swim) of 

 rivers or the sea ; this fear was found to date from a 

 narrow escape from drowning in a stagnant pool when 

 he was about four years old, an incident that he had 

 completely forgotten and only recalled to memory 

 after long trial. The fear persisted because he still 

 continued to react to the pond or canal as a child of 

 four, and it was only when the memor>' and associa- 

 tion were restored that he was able to apply the 

 criterion of adult experience and banish the fear. 



In the second group the individual is afraid of some- 

 thing that he will not, or dare not, admit to being 

 frightened of, but the feeling of fear cannot be alto- 

 gether extinguished, and tends to find expression by 

 some channel to which the conscience or amour propre 

 can take no exception. The feeling, which is thus 

 displaced from its true object, may — 



(a) Reactivate a childish fear; or 



{b) Become attached to some object that can stand as 

 a s;^Tnbol of the true fear; or 



(c) It may intensify one of the common, instinctive 

 fears of mankind. 



{a) Many fears, that persist from childhood and are 

 confidently attributed to some early shock, prove on 

 close examination to owe their survival to reinforce- 



