Phobias: Fighting the Fear. Helen Saul

and not even the most glamorous women are immune. This is explored further in chapter 8, on gender.

      Arsenal striker Dennis Bergkamp has had a golden career. He has been voted FIFA’s third best player and the top European. But he is unlikely to get a game in Greece, Turkey or Eastern Europe. For Bergkamp has a clause written into his contract ensuring that his club cannot insist on his flying. While the rest of the team take short flights to matches in the north of England or Europe, Bergkamp sets off by car, coach or train. He has flown in the past, but the last time was to play for Holland in the 1994 World Cup in the US. Since then, he has refused to fly at all and if he cannot get to a match overland, he cannot play. Bergkamp’s fear is common knowledge in football circles but he will not talk about the reasons behind it. He has said that after he finishes playing football he may address his fear, but that for the time being at least, he is grounded.

      Hans Christian Andersen was middle-aged by the time he developed his fear of fire, following the death of his old friend Jette Wulff in a blaze aboard the Atlantic steamer Austria. After that, Andersen always carried a rope with him, so that he could escape through a window in case of fire. He never used the rope, but it can still be seen at the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Denmark. His behaviour was exceptional even at a time when fires were relatively common because contemporary buildings were often wooden. But his fear did not prevent him travelling, it simply added to his luggage. He wrote about fire in at least three stories, ‘The Pixie and the Grocers’, ‘The Tin Soldier’ and ‘The Lovers’, but he never tackled his fear.

      He had other, stranger fears. He was afraid of dying, of seeming dead while still alive and of being buried alive. He was also afraid of seeing the dead. These fears were not unusual for the time. The mid nineteenth century was a morbid era and many were fixated with death. At a New Year’s Eve party in 1845, he declared that dead people should mark their presence with tones. But then, both he and his hostess, Jenny Lind, the famous Swedish opera singer, were shocked and frightened when they heard a loud C ring out from an apparently untouched piano. However, he managed to capitalise on his fears. Twelve years later, in To Be Or Not To Be the hero hears a reverberating E and thinks it may be a sign from his dead beloved, Esther. So his fear was not entirely in vain.

      …And Some Fictional Ones

      Spiders, snakes and rats are convenient symbols for fear or disgust and our screens are littered with them. Film directors rely on our near-universal unease to set a scene within a couple of frames. These are obviously difficult viewing if they are the object of your phobia and chapter 2 explores how far the media might even contribute to some of our fears.

      Direct portrayals of phobias are less common but in the film Arachnophobia, Dr Ross Jennings (played by Jeff Daniels) has been intensely afraid of spiders all his life. His first memory is of himself lying near-naked in his cot when a spider crawled through the bars and on to his leg. His limbs froze and he was utterly helpless, unable to stop it moving over his bare skin.

      The film climaxes with a replica of this incident. Now adult, Jennings is lying motionless, trapped by fallen rubble: the cellar is starting to catch fire. He watches horrified as a huge Venezuelan spider approaches his foot. This time the spider’s bite would be fatal. It moves up his leg and onto his shirt. Is Jennings paralysed with fear again? Or does he have a plan? With impeccable timing, he waits until the spider climbs over a piece of wood lying across his chest, and then thumps the far end of the plank, catapulting the spider across the room into the fire. He and his country are spared.

      George Orwell’s 1984 tackles the subject of specific fears more directly. Winston Smith pales and endures ‘a black instant of panic’ when a rat appears in the secret room he shares with his girlfriend, Julia. Later, when his opposition to the all-pervading Party is discovered, he is sent to the Ministry of Love. He is beaten with fists, truncheons, steel rods and boots. He endures high-voltage electric shocks, is deprived of food and sleep, undergoes hours of questioning and makes numerous confessions, but still he loves Julia. Then he is transported to the notorious Room 101.

      Room 101 contains ‘the worst thing in the world’. His captor, O’Brien, tells him: ‘The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

      This sounds rather like phobias. Winston’s Room 101 contains two enormous hungry rats in a cage held close to his face. O’Brien continues:

      There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.

      O’Brien is right. As the cage is brought so close that ‘the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils’ and the wire touches Winston’s cheek, he starts shouting frantically: ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’

      With this betrayal, Winston’s punishment comes to an abrupt halt, he is released but he is broken. He lives a humdrum existence until the ‘long-hoped-for bullet’ enters his brain.

      The torturer’s insights into extreme fear may be more telling than the routine assurances of health professionals. The idea of ‘an instinct which cannot be destroyed’ is untrue, as I will show, but describes how many feel when confronted with the object of their phobia. O’Brien also notes, correctly, that the cause of fear can be trivial and yet unendurable for that individual. He recognises that the fear is so intense that courage and cowardice become irrelevant and says that even people who could endure pain to the point of death will be unable to withstand it. Unlike health professionals, of course, he then goes on to exert just this level of pressure.

      Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is another extreme phobic portrayal. Detective Johnny Ferguson (James Stewart) is chasing a criminal across wet rooftops. He slips and is dangling over an edge, clinging on by his fingertips. A colleague above leans down to him and offers a hand, but Ferguson is dizzy and unable to take it. The colleague loses his balance and falls to his death below.

      This is Ferguson’s first inkling of his vertigo and he quits his job with the police force. ‘There’s no losing it,’ Ferguson is assured by his friend, Midge, who says that only another emotional shock will cure him. Rejecting this, he tries out some homespun behaviour therapy of his own, standing first on a stool and looking up and down. All is going well so he tries some higher steps. Unfortunately, he glimpses the street below out of the window and promptly faints. Thus his treatment ends. His vertigo is then assumed so permanent that others can base a murder plot on the certainty that he will not make it to the top of a tower at a crucial moment.

      The three very different stories all successfully convey the extent of phobic fear and the individual cost. Ross Jennings, a highly respected doctor, has spent his life dreading spiders and relying on others to kill or remove them. Winston Smith betrays his girlfriend and, in the end, himself, through his fear of rats. Johnny Ferguson gives up a long-held ambition to become Chief of Police when he quits his job and, worse, is unable to save the life of the woman he loves because of his vertigo.

      All three carry the fatalistic and depressing message that phobias are as much a part of us as our height or eye colour. It chimes with and may even have shaped the widespread perception that phobias are for life. Sadly, this is often true as we accept limitations on our lives far too readily and only a small proportion of phobias ever receive treatment. But, as this book sets out to show, phobias can be and are being cracked.

      From Antophobia to Zoophobia

      So what do we develop phobias of? In short: anything. The National Phobics