DISCOVERY 



17 



bility to the theory- of infantile origin. The feeling of 

 fear is attached not only to the actual height, but also 

 to the immensity and emptiness of siirroimding space, 

 which evokes more than a hint of that nightmarish 

 terror of the infinite ; yet for ninety-nine people out 

 of a hundred there is no feeling of height in an aero- 

 plane, unless it comes when flying alongside a bank 

 of solid-seeming clouds, or when fl^ang low near tall 

 buildings, so that we seem unable to gauge, or even 

 realise, the height imless there are intervening objects 

 over which the eye can travel. This fear, which is one 

 of the most intense, seems to affect adult civilised 

 man more than children or primitive races, and to be 

 absent in animals, so that we are tempted to associate 

 it with a widely developed consciousness and to 

 hazard that perhaps it reflects some deep inward sense 

 of littleness and insecurity evoked by an image of the 

 abyss and the concept of annihilation. 



The dread of death is commonly held to be an in- 

 stinctive fear, and Francis Bacon so classed it with no 

 uncertainty when he said that " men fear death as 

 children fear to go in the dark," but it is ver\r doubtful 

 whether normal man, fearfid though he may be of 

 injury and violence, is deeply afraid of death as such, 

 seeming rather to go his way believing " all men 

 mortal but himself," and where we find the fear of 

 death a prominent trait in character we are inclined 

 to suspect the presence of contributor^', hidden fears ; 

 so that the dread of death should, strange as it 

 may seem, properly find a place among the irrational 

 fears, though, on account of its special relationships, 

 there is not enough space to treat of it in this present 

 categorv'. 



The origin of an irrational fear from a hidden wish 

 or desire may be illustiated by the case of a clerk, 

 underpaid perhaps, in a firm whose business methods 

 are not over-scrupulous. He finds that he has oppor- 

 tunities of making money safelj' at their expense, but, 

 being a stricth^ honest man, he neither j-ields to the 

 temptation nor has he any conscious fear of doing so. 

 Presently, however, he develops a fear that he may 

 have borrowed stamps from the petty cash without 

 repaying them, that he may have cheated the firm by 

 using the office stationer^' for his private correspon- 

 dence, and finally he develops an unreasonable ner- 

 vousness of policemen. The fear thus becomes a most 

 effective safeguard against yielding to the unconscious 

 wsh. 



The classification of the processes by which an 

 irrational fear may arise is necessarily artificial, for 

 several may, and indeed usually do, contribute to a 

 given case, as can be seen in the following example 

 in which nearly all the processes dealt with coexist : 



A young married woman developed rather suddenly 

 an intolerable fear of being alone in a room ; she could 



give no reason for it, except that she had been slightly 

 nervous in a similar way as a child, after she had been 

 frightened by an old man peering through the window. 

 She said that she had no cause to be afraid of any- 

 thing. On examining the fear more closely, she could 

 only add that she felt as though " something would 

 happen " to her if she continued to stay in the room. 

 On being asked to let her mind go free and try to 

 imagine what might happen to her, she produced 

 slowly and with long pauses the following picture : 

 " I feel as though the floor might open up. And now 

 I see a square opening lined with bricks; it is very 

 deep and there is dark, muddy water at the bottom 

 of it. (Long pause.) There is someone at the bottom 

 who wants to pull me in. I can't see who it is. . . . 

 Now I can see . . . it's M." M. was a man with 

 whom she had been on affectionate terms before her 

 marriage ; he had lately reappeared in her life, but 

 she "had tried to keep him out of her thoughts." 

 She had been warned that she would " get into deep 

 water," if she had an\-thing to do with him. It took 

 considerable time to analyse this vision, but eventually 

 it was found that the brick lining and the water sug- 

 gested a disused shaft of which she had been afraid 

 as a child, for a small boy had been drowned in it, and 

 his fate had been held up to her as a warning " because 

 he ought not to have gone there, but he had been 

 tempted by the chestnuts that were lying about." 

 The fear of \ielding to temptation (which implies a 

 forbidden wish) and the resultant scandal and disaster 

 were sjTnbolised by falling or being dragged into the 

 muddy well in which the little boy had been drowned 

 — a little boy who, to her childish eyes, had been thus 

 terribly punished for \ielding to temptation. The 

 localisation of the fear in the closed room was deter- 

 mined partly by the reactivation of a childish fear and 

 partly by the feeling of being ' ' hemmed in ' ' that 

 corresponded to the conditions of marriage hampering 

 her freedom. She was afraid of being alone, because 

 only if alone with the man would she be in danger 

 of that intimacy that she both desired and feared. 

 The s^nnptomatic fear disappeared in this case, as it 

 often does, so soon as its meaning was realised. But 

 it is not to be assumed that all is well with the indi- 

 vidual when this has been accomplished ; he is the 

 better off in being able to react directly and consciously 

 to his difficulties, but his chief gain will probably lie 

 in overcoming the tendency that led him to remain 

 in ignorance of the true source of his fear. 



For the irrational fear is in most cases the expres- 

 sion of an unsuccessful attempt to evade the real 

 fear ; the problem is relegated to depths below our 

 conscious self and is there dealt with on lines that we 

 can recognise as belonging to the mode of thought of 

 the child or of primitive man — the type from which 



