Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears...

While I was in KS last week leading seminars and discussions on the Book of Job and some contemporary social and religious issues facing Americans, I stole away to the Garden City public library for about an hour to "escape" and be with my thoughts. I picked up a New Yorker and a daily newspaper and settled into my chair. But, before I began to read, I put them down, stared off into space, and thought, "I really don't want to read about contemporary events now. I want something else to tickle my mental processes, to take me to a different place." So, I began to wander through the reference collection, until my eyes spotted the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears & Anxieties (Oxford: Facts on File, 1989--a second edition, with even more fears, was put out in 2000). Edited by Ronald Doctor and Ada Kahn, this source will no doubt become the "Bible" for those who treat, and want to invent, fears.

What struck me as I spent time with this book is that it listed about 600 "fear" terms, many of which appeared in no dictionary, which it said were legitimate "fears" that people faced. This list has become the source for most of the Internet lists of phobias, though no one ever gives attribution to the Encyclopedia. My prediction, already borne out by a quick Internet search, is that counselors of all stripes will now take the list, which includes everything from "fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth" (arachibutyrophobia) to what one might call a more common fear, such as claustrophobia, and claim to be able to "cure" someone of their fears for a small fee. I think, however, that the multiplication of terms for fears (see below) not only stimulates entrepreneurial action, but says something about ourselves in the 21st century. We want to believe that the feelings we have, the fears we experience, are real. One of the best ways we have to convince ourselves that things are real is to invent a clinical "name" to go with them. By clinging to a word, preferably a word with a Greek derivation, we can treat our situation as a sort of lifeboat or object onto which we hold lest we be swept away in the vicious torrents of life.

The "Value" of Fears

Thus, the manufacture of words for diverse fears has become a cottage industry in America. If someone can invent a word for fear of peanut butter sticking to one's mouth, why not have one for "fear of arriving at work and finding the coffee pot dirty," or "fear of waking up and believing that the world has come to an end"? Indeed, the possibilities are nearly endless. But, as is often the case in life, fears are real, and they need to be dealt with before one is "free" to pursue one's life. In my judgment, however, the primary value of a multiplication of terms for fears is that it encourages us to learn our Greek (and sometimes Latin) roots, thus bringing us into worlds that we scarcely knew existed. Thus, rather than studying fears to learn what my fears are, I study fears to learn more vocabulary.

Let me illustrate the last point by one simple example. The Encyclopedia tells us that amychophobia is the "fear of being scratched." The scratch may come from a number of sources but there must be people out there who not only fear scratches but perhaps obsessively fear scratches. Well, unless you are a Greek scholar and have the big Liddell-Scott dictionary handy, you probably don't know much about the Greek word behind it. The verb is amussein, which means to lacerate or scratch, and the noun formed off amussein is amuktikos, meaning the same thing. When a "u" in Greek is brought into English, it usually is rendered "y," and hence, a direct transliteration of the Greek term is amykto... Well, lo and behold, the OED has one English word derived from this Greek term--amyctic. The word, which actually is a good one, in my judgment, means "excoriating, irritating, vellicating." One might have an amyctic medication or treatment. We might even use the word figuratively to describe a neighbor, a hot-tempered person, or even a taste. Thus, when we learn the term amychophobia we learn not only the notion of a fear of being scratched, but we are ushered into a Greek world, which then takes us to vellicate (to irritate, pluck, nip, pinch, tear by means of sharp points) and then a whole network of sophisticated and useful English words. This can be multiplied manifold, with very rich results.

Thus, even though I am sympathetic to the claim that between 8 and 18 percent of Americans suffer from some kind of irrational fear that might quite easily be treated, I am more interested in what the multiplication of words for fear tells us about ourselves, as well as the worlds of words that new "fear words" open up for us. I am not a man who dwells on fear; I am a man, however, who dwells on words about fears.

Historical "Fear Words" in English

Before looking at several of the words which Doctor and Kahn give us in their Encyclopedia, I would like to introduce what one might call the "classic" words for fear in English--those going back more than 80 years. Let me list about 12, with the years of their first usage in parentheses. Pride of place goes to, drum roll, hydrophobia (1547). Then, we have aerophobia (1775), astrophobia (1871), agoraphobia (1873), claustrophobia (1879), anthropophobia (1880) gynophobia (1886), acrophobia (1892), erythrophobia(!) (1894), brontophobia (1905), homophobia (1920, and then with a new definition in 1969), and arachnophobia (1925).*

[*After completing this and the next essay, I discovered 13 more "classic" phobia-terms. I will list them in my third essay.]

Before getting to the "modern" terms for fears (I will not have time to list and explain all, though lists of phobias proliferate on the Net), let's see how some of these "classic" fear terms were used.

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