I hesitate to accept Ribot’s classification, inasmuch as we have
pointed out that fear is prior to pain. In most lower animals
it is hardly probable that not having representations that
there is present a fear of pain in advance of the pain itself.
Fear under such conditions can only be awakened by an actual
sensory experience whether it be painful or not. In fact Ribot
himself agrees to the fact that “There is a primary, instinctive,
unreasoning fear preceding all individual experience, a hereditary
fear.”
Perhaps a word may be said in regard to the factor of disgust
as having a common basis with fear. It is only by a stretch of
imagination, if not by a stretch of words, that fear and disgust
can be identified. There may be fear where there is no disgust,
and there may be disgust where there is no fear. The two are
independent variables, and can hardly be referred to as one and
the same fundamental reaction, such as withdrawal and flight. The
object of disgust does not preclude approach. The avoidance or
aversion, the nausea and vomiting are all subsequent phenomena.
Disgust may even follow after an abuse of food, of pleasant or
necessary objects of nutrition, such as satiety.
The reactions of the fear instinct run the contrary way, approach
is precluded from the very start. Fear is not associated with
useful objects or events, unless it be in morbid states of fear.
And still fear and disgust may become intimately associated when
disgust and its objects awaken the fear instinct, and the fear
becomes the fear of disgust or of the disgusting object. Disgust is
more of a specialized character, and is associated with particular
events or specific objects, while fear, in its primitive form at
least, is more of a generalized character.
In the higher forms of life disgust may be so intimately related to
fear that the two become synthesized, so to say, and are felt like
one emotional state, the state becoming one of fear disgust. In
such cases the fear instinct, fear disgust, is a determining factor
of the morbid state. This is confirmed by clinical experience of
the various cases of psychopathic functional neurosis and psychosis.
In the various morbid states of the depressive types fear is
awakened long before any pain is actually suffered, or any
particular cause is found by the patient to account for the terror
that dominates his mental life. The fear comes first while the
representative cause is assigned by the sufferer as the cause of
the fear.
Similarly in the functional psychosis and neurosis the object,
experience, event, may be quite ordinary without any suggestion of
pain or distress in it. In fact, the experience may be indifferent
or even pleasant, but when associated with the fear instinct may
become the nucleus of a very distressing pathological state. The
experience is the _occasion_, while the fear instinct, the intimate
companion of the impulse of self-preservation, is the only cause of
functional psychopathic maladies.
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