Classic Words for Fear

One of the signal deficiencies of the 1989 Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears & Anxieties is that it gives no historical perspective. It doesn't say whether the editors are making up terms as they go along or if some of the words have a long and useful history. I try to "correct" this deficiency in this essay, by tracing the origin of 12 "fear" terms. The next essay will explore ten more, before looking at some of the contemporary terms for "fears." Let's begin with classic terms.

1. Hydrophobia. We have the following quotation from a medical book in 1547: hidroforbia or abhoryinge of water...This impediment doth come..of a melancoly humour." The sentence points us to the classical notion of medical science, derived from Hippocrates and others in ancient Greece, that the body consists of four "humours" that need to be balanced in order for a person to live well. Burton, in his amazing book The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) used the term as follows: "The most known are these: Lycanthropia, Hydrophobia, Chorus sancti viti..." (I would love to know what the last one is!). You can see that a vocabulary of "fears" has not yet congealed, and that such a vocabulary might grow up with the notion of types of insanity. Lycanthropy was a term known from the ancient Greek world to describe an insanity in which a person imagines himself to be a wolf. I would love to understand how it is that lycanthropy developed, since not only don't people speak of it at all today, but very few people I know or have heard of imagine themselves to be wolves. Burton gave the following example of lycanthropia--"Wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves or some such beasts." Well, maybe modern rock concerts are an equivalent! By the 19th century the incidents of lycanthropy had declined to such an extent that the word only was used in a moral context. From 1891: "Young boys and girls were bred..in crime, even to the pitch of moral lycanthropy."

Back to hydrophobia for a minute. The term developed because of its association with dog bites. From 1642: "Upon the biting of a mad dog there ensues an hydrophobia or fear of water." By the 19th century we have a more complete medical statement: "Hydrophobia..is the disease caused by inoculation with the saliva of a rabid animal, and is so called from the violent and suffocating spasms of the throat which occur when the patient attempts to drink." Well, this is taking me far too long (the study of words will do that to you!), so let's return to our "classic" list.

2. Aerophobia. This was simply defined in 1775 as "the dread of air, a kind of phrenzy." By 1847 someone could define it as "the dread of air; a symptom of hydrophobia." However, with the invention of the airplane (originally called the "aeroplane") in the early 20th century, the definition of aerophobia changed, so that now it is "an abnormal and persistent fear of flying."

3. Agoraphobia. This word goes back to a medical journal in 1873 and means the "fear of squares or open places." By 1884 an adjective had been invented: "The giddiness which accompanies his agoraphobic attacks," while the word agoraphobe, to describe someone who suffers from the condition, wasn't invented until 1955 ("the inmates include suicidal types, agoraphobes, and plain nervous people").

5. Claustrophobia is the opposite of agoraphobia, and it only took six years from the introduction of the former to coin the latter (1879). Interesting in the invention of this word is that it is derived both from Latin and Greek. The "claustro" is derived from the same word from which we get "cloister"--a "shut in" place where the monks live. Interesting also is the "19th century-type" definition of this phenomenon given by the Century Dictionary, which linked both agoraphobia and claustrophobia to a kind of "neurasthenia," which was the big disorder of the late 19th century. It defines agoraphobia, for example, as "a feature of some cases of neurasthenia," and it renders claustrophobia as "a morbid dread of confined places, to which hysterical, and neurasthenic persons are sometimes subject." Claustrophobic was introduced in 1889 and claustrophobe trumped agoraphobe by 44 years, being introduced in 1911 ("Like the sufferer from agoraphobia, the claustrophbe experiences the revival of an instinct that has been dormant for untold generations." Tell me, can we hear Dr. Freud here?). And, just to show you the creativeness of language, we have the invention of claustrophilia (a "morbid" desire to be enclosed within a confined space") in 1926. Arthur Koestler popularized the term with reference to Jews: "Generations of Jews, huddled together..developed that peculiar feature of Jewish communities which one might be tempted to name 'claustrophilia.'" So much fun; let's move on--much faster now.

5. Gynophobia is, you guessed it, fear of women. OW Holmes Sr., in one of his last works (Moral Antipathy--a novel) coined the term in 1886: "If we give it a name, we shall have to apply the term Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman." OW Holmes, Sr. probably invented more terms in English than any other person in the 19th century, with the possible exception of Jeremy Bentham. By the 1940s the term appeared in a standard psychiatric dictionary.

6. Acrophobia first appeared in a dictionary of psychological medicine in 1892. "Acrophobia, described by Dr. Andrea Verga (a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan--lived from 1811-1895), means the dread of being in high places." The New Yorker has a literary use of the term: "We walked over to the winding parapet,..took a shuddering, acrophobic look down the well..."

7. Most surprising on the list is the term invented in 1894: erythrophobia. It can mean two things: a fear of blushing or hypersensitivity to the color red. Would we say that a bull is erythrophobic.. or erythrophilic? In any case, its first appearance was in a medical dictionary: "Erythrophobia, morbid intolerance of red colors: sometimes observed after operations for cataract." The Century has a word not in the OED: erythrophobe--rather than being a person who can't stand red, the Century defines it as an animal made uncomfortable by red light. You could spend a whole day just studying the variety of English words that are formed off the Greek root for red (erythro). Well, not today. As we will see in the next essay, we now have words for fears of lots of colors.

8. Brontophobia, an intense dread of thunder or thunder storms (the brontosaurus is the "thunder lizard"), was first coined in 1905: "He was affected with brontophobia in his later years. Acting on the principle that there cannot be too much of a good thing, someone has invented terms such as ceraunophobia (keraunophobia) and tonitrophobia to mean the same thing. When you combine it with fear of lightning (these often go together, you know), you get other words, such as astrophobia, which can also be spelled astraphobia. The OED informs us, however, that astrophobia (invented in 1871) is technically the "fear of the influence of the stars." Joy unending.

9. I could devote an entire essay to homophobia, though I will resist the urge. Originally coined in 1920, the term meant a "fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex," such as would mirror the earlier invention of gynophobia. Upon further research, however, I discovered that an earlier term for the same subject, coined in 1880, was anthropophobia. This would make sense, since the origin of terms in our society frequently begins with "male-oriented" terms before the "female reflection" is introduced. Thus, we have anthropophobia in 1880 and gynophobia in 1886. The term homophobia took on its current meaning (fear of gay men) in 1969 with a Time Magazine article: "Such homophobia is based on understandable instincts among straight people, but it involves innumerable misconceptions and oversimplifications."

10. Arachnophobia didn't emerge with the movie of about a decade ago; it was coined in 1925 and means "an irrational fear of spiders." Blackwell's Magazine coined both arachnophobia and arachophobe in the same issue. "Solomon presented the bottle to the Queen of Sheba, or his little Arachnophobe, as he called her, 'Take it home with you,' he said; 'then you won't dream of spiders any more.'"

Now that we have cleared away some historical underbrush, we are ready to proceed intrepidly to today. The next essay tries to do that.

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