Sometimes, instead of the indiscriminate fear of worry, there are
localized fears, called phobias, which creep or spring into a
man's thoughts and render him miserable. Thus there is fear of
high places, of low places, of darkness, of open places, of
closed places,--fear of dirt, fear of poison and of almost
everything else. A bright young man was locked, at the age of
fourteen, in a closed dark shanty; when released he rushed home
in the greatest terror. Since then he has been afflicted with a
fear of leaving home. He dares venture only about fifty feet and
then is impelled to run back. If anybody hinders his return he
attacks them; if the door is locked he breaks through a window.
He is in a veritable panic, and yet presents no other fears; is a
reader and thinker, clever at his work (he is a painter), but his
fear remains inaccessible and uncontrollable. Often one
experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the
associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway
to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case,
the whole life of the individual becomes changed.
Throughout history the man without fear has been idolized. The
hero is courageous, that he must be; the coward is despised,
whatever good may be in him. Consequently, there is in most men a
fear of showing fear; and pride, self-respect, often urge men on
when they really fear. This pride is greater in some races than
others--in the Indian and the Anglo-Saxon--but the Oriental does
not think it wrong to be afraid. In the Great War this fear of
showing fear played a great role in producing shell shock, in
that men shrank from actual cowardice but easily developed
neuroses which carried them from the fighting line.
There is this to add to this little sketch of fear: it turns
easily to anger for both are responses to a threat. I remember in
my boyhood being mortally afraid of a larger boy who one day
chased me, caught me and started to "beat me up." Before I knew
it, the fear had gone and I was fighting him with such fierceness
and fury that in amazement he ran away. So a rat, cornered,
becomes fierce and blood-thirsty and there is always the danger,
in the use of fear as a weapon, that it become changed quite
readily into the fighting spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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