i have no intention of describing the ordinary, familiar phenomena of fear. these, in both their psychological and physiological manifestations, will be found adequately treated in any good text-book on the emotions. what i wish to do, rather, is to call attention to some little-known facts which find scant mention in the text-books for the excellent reason that it is only within the past few years that they have been made part of organised knowledge. yet they are facts of the utmost significance from both a theoretical and a practical point of view; and, indeed, an understanding of them is of no less importance to the layman than to the scientist. their discovery has made possible for the first time what may be called an applied psychology of fear—that is to say, a statement of principles the250 application of which will go far toward solving the problem of how to avert the evil consequences of fear without the loss of its really beneficial qualities.
that there is a certain virtue in fear requires no scientific demonstration. fear, as everybody ought to be aware, is intrinsically one of the most useful of emotions. it is an instinct implanted in us as a prime aid in the struggle for existence. doubtless for this reason it is, as compared with the other emotions, the earliest to make its appearance in the newborn child. preyer, whose book, “the mind of the child,” is not nearly so well known in this country as it should be, puts the first manifestation of fear in an infant at the twenty-third day after birth. other observers, including charles darwin, have found no indications of it until somewhat later than this. but all agree that it is the first emotion, properly so called, to show itself, and that its normal function is to instil caution and prudence in relation to objects and actions that might have destructive effects.
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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 a252 psychological training, that full realisation has been gained of the tremendous r?le 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 knows253 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 medical254 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—hyp255notism, 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 rap256idly, 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 experi257ence 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.
it is the more desirable since, as investigation is daily revealing more and more clearly, abnormal dread is not the only malady resulting from a fear-occasioning event. where one man, as the result of a sudden fright, may in course of time become a258 phobiac, another may develop symptoms, not of mental trouble, but of bodily disease. a most instructive instance is afforded by the experiences of a young russian immigrant in this country who had the good fortune to come under the observation of those two eminent specialists in the treatment of mentally-caused disorders, doctors morton prince and boris sidis.
the trouble for which this young man sought relief was, to all appearance, purely physical. it consisted of periodic convulsive attacks that racked the right half of his body, and had led to a diagnosis of epilepsy. since sundry delicate symptoms characteristic of epilepsy were absent, however, the specialists, after a careful study of the case, came to the conclusion that the spasms from which their patient suffered might involve no true organic disease, and might be nothing more than the outward manifestation of some deep-seated psychical disturbance. with this possibility in mind they questioned him259 both in the normal waking state and in hypnosis, and brought to light some interesting facts.
the first attack, he told them, had set in five years before, when he was sixteen years old and living in russia. after returning from a dance one evening, he went back to look for a ring lost by the young lady whom he had escorted home. it was past midnight, and his way lay over a country road by a cemetery. nearing the cemetery, he thought he heard somebody or something running after him. he turned to flee, fell, and lost consciousness. he still was unconscious when found on the road. after he had been brought to, it was seen that he was afflicted with a spasmodic, uncontrollable shaking of the right side, involving his head, arm, and leg. this lasted almost a week, when he seemed as well as ever. but every year thereafter, at about the same time, he had had an attack similar in all respects to the first one, excepting only that he did not become unconscious.
he further declared, while in the hypnotic state,260 that throughout the period of the attacks he had unpleasant dreams, all relating to the fright and fall of five years before. in these dreams he lived over and over again the experience from which his trouble dated.
“i find myself,” said he, “on the lonely road in my little native town. i am hurrying along the road near the cemetery. it is very dark. i imagine somebody—a robber, or a ghost—is running after me. i become frightened, call for help, and fall. then i wake up with a start, and remember nothing about the dream. i no longer am afraid, but i have these terrible spasms.”
it was even found possible to produce the convulsive attacks experimentally by simply reminding him, while hypnotised, of the incident on the road. to doctors prince and sidis it now seemed certain that his malady was due to nothing else than the persistence of an intensely vivid subconscious memory-image of the fright he had experienced; and that he would no longer be troubled by it if the memory-261image were destroyed by psychotherapeutic treatment. suggestions to this effect were accordingly given him, when awake as well as when hypnotised. the outcome was all that could be desired, for a speedy and permanent cure was brought about.
paralysis, muscular contractures, symptoms mimicking tuberculosis, kidney disease, and other dread organic maladies, are also recognised to-day as possible after-effects, through the power of subconscious mental action, of happenings that give rise to a profound feeling of fear. sometimes more than one symptom is thus occasioned in the same patient. again, for the purpose of concrete illustration, i cite a typical case from real life—the case of a pole, a man of twenty-five, treated for a weird combination of mental and physical disturbances.
physically, he suffered from severe and frequent attacks of headache, setting in gradually, and preceded by a feeling of depression and dizziness. during the attacks his body became cold, his head throbbed violently, he shivered incessantly. to keep262 warm, he was obliged to wrap himself in many blankets. mentally, he was tormented by many phobias. he was afraid of closed places, and still more afraid of being obliged to remain alone, especially at night. he had a morbid fear of the dead, and would on no account enter a room with a corpse in it or attend a funeral. nothing could induce him to visit a cemetery, even in company with other people. fear of dogs was also a conspicuous feature of his case, as was fear of fire.
through psychological exploration of his subconsciousness, every one of these symptoms was traced to actual experiences that had given him great emotional shocks, and in almost every instance to experiences that had occurred in his childhood. the fear of dogs had its origin in an exciting episode he had had with some dogs when he was only three. the pyrophobia was connected with the fact that at four years of age he had been hastily carried from a burning building, shivering with fright and cold, into the open air of a frosty night. his dread of cemeteries263 and of the dead was rooted in a subconscious recollection of terrors inspired in him, while a child, by hearing “all kinds of ghost stories and tales of wandering lost souls, and of spirits of dead people hovering about churchyards.”
in addition to this, his mother, a very superstitious woman, when he was nine, placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a “cure” for some trifling ailment. hence his special fear of corpses. as to the headaches and the sensations of cold, they were the result partly of this “dead hand” memory, and partly of the memory of a still more severe experience, occurring at about the same time, when he was forced to spend an entire night in a barn in mid-winter, to escape a party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father unmercifully and had killed one of his little brothers. his fear of closed spaces and his fear of being alone were associated with the same experience.
as he grew older much of all this faded from his conscious recollection. but, by analysing his dreams264 and questioning him in hypnosis, it was found that subconsciously he had forgotten none of it. evidence also was forthcoming indicating that from time to time, owing to the occurrence of later experiences of a less sinister nature but disquieting enough, there had been exceptionally vivid revivals of the earlier memories; and that it was in this way that they had been able to acquire such tremendous disease-producing power.
here, i am confident, we have the answer to the question raised in connection with the development of phobias in adult life from seemingly trivial occurrences. heredity, no doubt, plays some part. but assuredly a far greater influence is exercised by the presence of baneful memory-images that need only an appropriate stimulus to excite them into pernicious activity. the mechanism of fear-caused diseases, to put it briefly, is probably much the same as that operating in the production of the familiar phenomenon of dreaming.
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when we dream of anything, we do so because an incident of the waking life has, through association of ideas, roused some dormant emotional “complex,” some group of subconscious ideas relating to matters which are, or once were, of great significance to us, and our dream is a symbolic expression of this dormant complex.4 so is it with the man who suffers from a fear-induced malady, whether it take the form of a mental or of a physical disorder.
perhaps of a neurotic tendency by inheritance, perhaps of a good heredity, but temporarily weakened by grief, worry, etc., something occurs that gives this person a sudden fright, and, by association of ideas, reminds him, if only subconsciously, of earlier fear-inspiring episodes in his life. ordinarily there would be no unpleasant after-effect, except possibly a few nights of bad dreams. but in his condition dreaming is not sufficient to give vent to the subconscious 266emotions. some other channel of discharge must be found, and it is found in the production of disease-symptoms—whether mental or physical, or both mental and physical—symbolising the emotional complex or complexes stimulated by the happening that frightened him.
indeed, there is reason for suspecting that all functional nervous and mental troubles, no matter what their immediate cause, are traceable to fear-memories of remote occurrence, dating usually from the days of childhood. certainly it is possible to detail from recent medical practice innumerable cases in support of this view. not to be tedious, i will give only one or two, selecting first a case of doctor coriat’s, in which the patient, a middle-aged woman, had for years been tormented by an increasing fear that she would go insane, and that, if insane, she would inevitably injure some member of her family. the poor woman had worn herself out brooding over this, and was gradually qualifying for commitment to some institution. but doctor coriat could not find,267 either in her physical condition or in the facts of her family history, anything to warrant her belief that she was doomed to become insane.
suspecting, therefore, that this belief was merely a hysterical outgrowth of some forgotten shock in her previous life, and knowing that in sleep such latent memories have a tendency to emerge momentarily into the field of consciousness, he questioned her regarding the frequency and content of her dreams.
“i dream a great deal,” she told him, “but i never have a clear remembrance of what i have dreamed about.”
yet, when hypnotised and again questioned regarding the dreams, she was able to detail many of them. one in particular interested doctor coriat. it was of a recurrent character, and was identified by the patient as having first been dreamed at the time she began to worry over her condition. it was, in fact, a dream in which she saw herself insane.
“had anything unpleasant happened to you the268 day before you first had that dream?” doctor coriat now inquired of his hypnotised patient.
“nothing that i can remember, except that i went to a friend’s funeral.”
“the funeral of a very dear friend?”
“not exactly—just a friend.”
“but that should not have had such a disturbing effect on your mind. did anything happen at the funeral?”
“i saw a woman there whose eyes frightened me.”
“and why did they frighten you?”
“because they reminded me of a preacher i used to know when i was a little girl. he was a revivalist, and i always thought he was crazy. i went to his meetings, and got terribly worked up, and it frightened me very much. i thought i would go crazy too, just like the preacher.”
to doctor coriat it seemed unnecessary to ask any more questions. as he saw it, the haunting dread of insanity was nothing but the continuation269 in consciousness of the forgotten memory of the childhood fright, revived by subconscious association of the woman at the funeral with the preacher whose rabid exhortations had inspired the patient with such terror. on this theory he utilised the resources of medical psychology to deprive the baneful memory-image of its power to harm, and soon had the satisfaction of being able to record a perfect cure.
in another case, successfully treated by doctor sidis, the subconscious persistence of childhood fears actually threatened a young woman with perhaps lifelong confinement in an asylum for the insane. she had, in fact, been placed in a new york hospital for observation, and it was there that doctor sidis treated her. according to her relatives, who did not doubt that she had lost her reason, she suffered from strange hallucinations, particularly of constantly hearing voices call to her, and of being killed. she even imagined at times that she was dead, and would lie in a cataleptic condition, rigidly motionless. at other times she complained of a painful270 stiffness in her arms, and of difficulty in walking.
testing her psychologically, doctor sidis found cause for thinking that her trouble was hysterical rather than a true insanity involving brain lesions, and he promptly questioned her relatives regarding her previous history. she had had, he learned, some exceedingly unpleasant experiences with a brother-in-law, a rough, brutal fellow, but they did not seem adequate to account for her various symptoms. these, he suspected, had their roots farther back in her life, and, although she professed a total inability to recall any severe fright or worry other than those associated with her brother-in-law, he remained unshaken in his suspicion.
“what do you dream about?” he asked her.
“i don’t exactly know,” she replied. “i am sure i dream a good deal, though, for when i wake i always seem to have been dreaming, and to have had horrid dreams. all i can say is that i dimly remember seeing in them many ugly faces.”
“is your brother-in-law’s face among them?”
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“yes, and other people’s faces. but i’m sure i don’t know who they are.”
subjected to a special process of “mind tunneling” of doctor sidis’s own invention, the patient recalled a number of dreams in vivid detail. most of them showed a strong resemblance to one another, in that they had as their setting a forest, and as their chief actors men of repulsive aspect, usually dressed in the roughest of clothing, and usually intent on capturing the dreamer. only the night before, she declared, she had dreamed that a man was trying to choke her, and she had awakened panic-stricken, and so drenched with perspiration that her nurse—who corroborated her statement—had had to change her night-gown.
“can you identify the men of your dreams—the men dressed in rough clothing who pursue you so fiercely?” doctor sidis asked, while she still was in the artificial state into which he had put her.
“yes, yes,” she answered, much agitated. “i know them only too well.”
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now, for the first time, she related to him two most significant episodes of her girlhood. once, it appeared, when she was hardly nine years old, she was walking along a country road, past a forest, when a wood-cutter—“a big man, with big arms and hands projecting from short sleeves”—tried to catch her and carry her into the forest. “he ran after me with outstretched arms. i screamed, and ran from him as fast as i could, calling for help all the time.” and, on another occasion, when she was even younger—only six—on her way to school through the woods, a man met her, gave her candy, talked to her nicely, and all at once seized her so roughly that she began to scream with fright and pain. at that moment somebody came along, and the man released her and fled.
these were the men whom she chiefly saw in her dreams; these were the shocks which, aggravated by the more recent experiences of a not dissimilar sort with her brother-in-law, were the true determinants of her hysteria—as was proved by the fact that273 upon psychological disintegration of her subconscious memories of them, a speedy and lasting return to health resulted.
in like manner the seemingly epileptic attacks of a nineteen-year-old new york “street arab” were found to be nothing more than the external manifestation of subconscious memory-images, dating back to early childhood, of nights passed in a dark, damp, terror-inspiring cellar. the sight of the discoloured corpse of a man who had died from cholera left in the mind of a sensitive girl of ten such a painful impression that years afterward, quite unaccountably as it seemed, she developed an abnormal fear of contracting some deadly disease; and had she not fortunately been taken to a skilled medical psychologist (doctor pierre janet) she would almost certainly have ended her days in an asylum. in the case of an over-worked boston young man, thought to be suffering from “dementia praecox,” it was found that his morbid notion that he had committed an “unpardonable sin” was only a hysterical product274 of subconsciously remembered fears of childhood. the victim himself eventually recognised this, declaring, in an autobiographical statement made at his physician’s request:
“my abnormal fear certainly originated from doctrines of hell which i heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly woman who taught sunday-school. my early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if i was not good enough to be saved.”
whether or no all cases of functional nervous and mental disease are thus rooted in emotional stresses of youth, certainly this is often enough the fact to constitute a serious warning to all who have anything to do with the upbringing of the young. if fears of childhood can persist throughout life and can affect adult development so profoundly as to be causal agents in the production of disease, it is obvious that parents and educators should adopt every means in their power to prevent the growth of unreasonable275 fears in the little ones in their care. yet, as matters are to-day, and not least in the home, most children are subject to influences that tend to foster, not inhibit, such fears.
in their presence, as was noted on a previous page, parents often discuss accidents, crimes, sensational doings of all sorts; they betray a fretfulness, an anxiety, an unrest, that cannot but react on the sensitive mind of the child, filling it with fears of it knows not what; they even utilise the fear impulse as a means of coercing the child into good behaviour; and, what is perhaps worst of all, many parents intrust their children to ignorant and superstitious nurses, who take a strange pleasure in “scaring them half to death” with tales of demons, ghosts and goblins.
fortunately the majority of people, as a result of later training and experience, or by the exercise of will-power, are able to suppress the fears of childhood; but often only at the cost of great mental torture. not so long ago i received a letter from a276 detroit business man, mr. john j. mitchell, that may well be quoted in this connection. he wrote:
“as a child, as far back as memory goes, i was ‘afraid of the dark,’ intensely afraid.... at about eleven years of age i got a place in a country store, and perhaps two years later changed to the largest store in town. this concern did a large, old-fashioned country business, buying produce and selling all manner of merchandise in exchange or on credit. this involved the use of two old-time buildings (frame) with three stories each and a cellar under all. owing to the character of the business and location, there were doors opening to the street and area on each side and rear from every floor, including the cellar, seven or eight in all, and widely apart, besides windows. it was my duty at dusk to see that all these doors were properly closed and barred for the night.... with my childish fear of the dark this daily task was an ordeal—at times a terrible ordeal.
“i never made complaint or confided my fears to277 a soul. but for some reason, the source of which was, and is, as obscure as my intangible fears, i resolved to cure myself of this terror.... my plan, adopted and unflinchingly carried out, was to compel myself—a slender, timid little kid—to go that round daily, in the shadowy dusk, without a light (which i was privileged to have, a lantern). i can only remember now the pain of dread and unreasoning apprehension, and the resolution to ‘have it over and done with.’
“i cannot now fix the time when it was accomplished, but in the end i was completely cured, so that, at least since my majority, i have not only been relieved of this dread, but i often welcome the folds of darkness (of night), as if wrapped about with a comforting garment. it will be a certain qualification to state that, at very long intervals, and always after some physical or mental strain, i feel momentarily a fear of return of old impressions in ‘uncanny’ surroundings.”
and, beyond any question, no matter how effectu278ally one may suppress such youthful fears, so far as relates to their survival in the upper consciousness, there will always be a subconscious remnant, a buried complex, ready to emerge and work mischief in one way or another. there is a world of truth in professor angelo mosso’s emphatic declaration:
“every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long.”
if not in such an extreme form as a phobia, or other functional disease, the early fears will nevertheless make their presence felt in later life. in some men they may engender lack of self-confidence, and even a despicable cowardice; in others they may breed superstitious terrors and usages. always, in some way, one may depend on it, they will affect the character, the intellect, the whole moral and mental make-up.
nor will their influence be confined to the individual. fear, as every psychologist knows, is one of the most contagious of the emotions. socially, as279 well as individually, it has a useful function to perform. the presence in all civilised communities of police and fire departments, boards of health, and the like, testifies impressively to the influence of social fear working normally as a conserving agent. but there may be, and frequently is, social as well as individual abnormality of fear; as in panics, massacres, lynchings. in order to deal with this effectually, in order to keep social fear within the bounds of reason, it will always be necessary to recognise that, after all, society is made up of a mass of individuals, and can only think and feel and act as individuals think and feel and act. train the individual properly, and society will be sane and healthy and efficient enough.
