successfully treated by Doctor Isador H. Coriat, a Boston neurologist
of my acquaintance. The patient was a young man who for nearly two
years had been tormented by an irrational fear of fields, parks, and
public squares. His relatives and friends had argued with him, he had
tried to conquer the phobia by force of will, but all to no purpose.
Nor could he give any reason for his abnormal dread.
Put into the hypnotic state, however, and questioned again, he recalled
an incident that at once revealed its source. Two years previously, it
appeared, he had been taking a horseback ride, when he unexpectedly
galloped into an open field.
“I became terribly frightened,” said he, “as the ground was rough, and
I thought I should certainly fall off the horse. I felt faint, my heart
beat rapidly, I broke into a cold perspiration and trembled all over.
It seemed as if the end of the world was coming. Since then, whenever
I see a field or a park I am reminded of this, and feel the same
agonising fear.”
In the case of another patient suffering from fear of closed spaces
the abnormal fear was traced to an occasion when, visiting a friend
in a small, close room, the patient had a fainting attack. In a third
patient, a young woman, there developed a fear of crowds because, some
time previously, at a crowded school celebration, she had been slightly
overcome by heat, and had “felt like screaming.” Another young woman
was afflicted with pyrophobia, or fear of fire, in such an extreme form
that she could not remain in a room where an open fire was burning, and
every night made the rounds of her house to satisfy herself there was
nothing that could start a conflagration. Inquiry showed that all this
morbid anxiety was an outgrowth of a previous experience with fire.
Sometimes memory of the antecedent causal experience is not entirely
blotted out of the upper consciousness. The sufferer may even entertain
a clear recollection of it and still be unable to conquer his phobia;
which, however, under these circumstances is not nearly so severe as
when the process is entirely one of subconscious mentation. In either
case, of course, the problem of the development of the phobia still
requires explanation. Only partial enlightenment is gained, after all,
when we recognise the causal action of some specific occurrence, such
as a fall, a fainting-fit, or the sight of a fire. Thousands of persons
experience these things without thereby becoming victims of a phobia.
When a phobia does result, some exceptional circumstances must be
operative, and it is manifestly desirable to learn, if possible, what
these are.
It is the more desirable since, as investigation is daily revealing
more and more clearly, abnormal dread is not the only malady resulting
from a fear-occasioning event. Where one man, as the result of a
sudden fright, may in course of time become a phobiac, another may
develop symptoms, not of mental trouble, but of bodily disease. A most
instructive instance is afforded by the experiences of a young Russian
immigrant in this country who had the good fortune to come under the
observation of those two eminent specialists in the treatment of
mentally-caused disorders, Doctors Morton Prince and Boris Sidis.
The trouble for which this young man sought relief was, to all
appearance, purely physical. It consisted of periodic convulsive
attacks that racked the right half of his body, and had led to a
diagnosis of epilepsy. Since sundry delicate symptoms characteristic
of epilepsy were absent, however, the specialists, after a careful
study of the case, came to the conclusion that the spasms from which
their patient suffered might involve no true organic disease, and might
be nothing more than the outward manifestation of some deep-seated
psychical disturbance. With this possibility in mind they questioned
him both in the normal waking state and in hypnosis, and brought to
light some interesting facts.
The first attack, he told them, had set in five years before, when he
was sixteen years old and living in Russia. After returning from a
dance one evening, he went back to look for a ring lost by the young
lady whom he had escorted home. It was past midnight, and his way lay
over a country road by a cemetery. Nearing the cemetery, he thought he
heard somebody or something running after him. He turned to flee, fell,
and lost consciousness. He still was unconscious when found on the
road. After he had been brought to, it was seen that he was afflicted
with a spasmodic, uncontrollable shaking of the right side, involving
his head, arm, and leg. This lasted almost a week, when he seemed as
well as ever. But every year thereafter, at about the same time, he had
had an attack similar in all respects to the first one, excepting only
that he did not become unconscious.
He further declared, while in the hypnotic state, that throughout the
period of the attacks he had unpleasant dreams, all relating to the
fright and fall of five years before. In these dreams he lived over and
over again the experience from which his trouble dated.
“I find myself,” said he, “on the lonely road in my little native town.
I am hurrying along the road near the cemetery. It is very dark. I
imagine somebody—a robber, or a ghost—is running after me. I become
frightened, call for help, and fall. Then I wake up with a start, and
remember nothing about the dream. I no longer am afraid, but I have
these terrible spasms.”
It was even found possible to produce the convulsive attacks
experimentally by simply reminding him, while hypnotised, of the
incident on the road. To Doctors Prince and Sidis it now seemed
certain that his malady was due to nothing else than the persistence
of an intensely vivid subconscious memory-image of the fright he had
experienced; and that he would no longer be troubled by it if the
memory-image were destroyed by psychotherapeutic treatment. Suggestions
to this effect were accordingly given him, when awake as well as when
hypnotised. The outcome was all that could be desired, for a speedy and
permanent cure was brought about.
Paralysis, muscular contractures, symptoms mimicking tuberculosis,
kidney disease, and other dread organic maladies, are also recognised
to-day as possible after-effects, through the power of subconscious
mental action, of happenings that give rise to a profound feeling of
fear. Sometimes more than one symptom is thus occasioned in the same
patient. Again, for the purpose of concrete illustration, I cite a
typical case from real life—the case of a Pole, a man of twenty-five,
treated for a weird combination of mental and physical disturbances.
Physically, he suffered from severe and frequent attacks of headache,
setting in gradually, and preceded by a feeling of depression and
dizziness. During the attacks his body became cold, his head throbbed
violently, he shivered incessantly. To keep warm, he was obliged to
wrap himself in many blankets. Mentally, he was tormented by many
phobias. He was afraid of closed places, and still more afraid of being
obliged to remain alone, especially at night. He had a morbid fear of
the dead, and would on no account enter a room with a corpse in it or
attend a funeral. Nothing could induce him to visit a cemetery, even in
company with other people. Fear of dogs was also a conspicuous feature
of his case, as was fear of fire.
Through psychological exploration of his subconsciousness, every one
of these symptoms was traced to actual experiences that had given him
great emotional shocks, and in almost every instance to experiences
that had occurred in his childhood. The fear of dogs had its origin in
an exciting episode he had had with some dogs when he was only three.
The pyrophobia was connected with the fact that at four years of age he
had been hastily carried from a burning building, shivering with fright
and cold, into the open air of a frosty night. His dread of cemeteries
and of the dead was rooted in a subconscious recollection of terrors
inspired in him, while a child, by hearing “all kinds of ghost stories
and tales of wandering lost souls, and of spirits of dead people
hovering about churchyards.”
In addition to this, his mother, a very superstitious woman, when he
was nine, placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a
“cure” for some trifling ailment. Hence his special fear of corpses.
As to the headaches and the sensations of cold, they were the result
partly of this “dead hand” memory, and partly of the memory of a still
more severe experience, occurring at about the same time, when he was
forced to spend an entire night in a barn in mid-winter, to escape a
party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father unmercifully and
had killed one of his little brothers. His fear of closed spaces and
his fear of being alone were associated with the same experience.
As he grew older much of all this faded from his conscious
recollection. But, by analysing his dreams and questioning him in
hypnosis, it was found that subconsciously he had forgotten none of it.
Evidence also was forthcoming indicating that from time to time, owing
to the occurrence of later experiences of a less sinister nature but
disquieting enough, there had been exceptionally vivid revivals of the
earlier memories; and that it was in this way that they had been able
to acquire such tremendous disease-producing power.
Here, I am confident, we have the answer to the question raised
in connection with the development of phobias in adult life from
seemingly trivial occurrences. Heredity, no doubt, plays some part.
But assuredly a far greater influence is exercised by the presence of
baneful memory-images that need only an appropriate stimulus to excite
them into pernicious activity. The mechanism of fear-caused diseases,
to put it briefly, is probably much the same as that operating in the
production of the familiar phenomenon of dreaming.
When we dream of anything, we do so because an incident of the waking
life has, through association of ideas, roused some dormant emotional
“complex,” some group of subconscious ideas relating to matters which
are, or once were, of great significance to us, and our dream is a
symbolic expression of this dormant complex.[4] So is it with the man
who suffers from a fear-induced malady, whether it take the form of a
mental or of a physical disorder.
Perhaps of a neurotic tendency by inheritance, perhaps of a good
heredity, but temporarily weakened by grief, worry, etc., something
occurs that gives this person a sudden fright, and, by association of
ideas, reminds him, if only subconsciously, of earlier fear-inspiring
episodes in his life. Ordinarily there would be no unpleasant
after-effect, except possibly a few nights of bad dreams. But in his
condition dreaming is not sufficient to give vent to the subconscious
emotions. Some other channel of discharge must be found, and it is
found in the production of disease-symptoms—whether mental or physical,
or both mental and physical—symbolising the emotional complex or
complexes stimulated by the happening that frightened him.
Indeed, there is reason for suspecting that all functional nervous and
mental troubles, no matter what their immediate cause, are traceable
to fear-memories of remote occurrence, dating usually from the days
of childhood. Certainly it is possible to detail from recent medical
practice innumerable cases in support of this view. Not to be tedious,
I will give only one or two, selecting first a case of Doctor Coriat’s,
in which the patient, a middle-aged woman, had for years been tormented
by an increasing fear that she would go insane, and that, if insane,
she would inevitably injure some member of her family. The poor woman
had worn herself out brooding over this, and was gradually qualifying
for commitment to some institution. But Doctor Coriat could not find,
either in her physical condition or in the facts of her family history,
anything to warrant her belief that she was doomed to become insane.
Suspecting, therefore, that this belief was merely a hysterical
outgrowth of some forgotten shock in her previous life, and knowing
that in sleep such latent memories have a tendency to emerge
momentarily into the field of consciousness, he questioned her
regarding the frequency and content of her dreams.
“I dream a great deal,” she told him, “but I never have a clear
remembrance of what I have dreamed about.”
Yet, when hypnotised and again questioned regarding the dreams, she
was able to detail many of them. One in particular interested Doctor
Coriat. It was of a recurrent character, and was identified by the
patient as having first been dreamed at the time she began to worry
over her condition. It was, in fact, a dream in which she saw herself
insane.
“Had anything unpleasant happened to you the day before you first had
that dream?” Doctor Coriat now inquired of his hypnotised patient.
“Nothing that I can remember, except that I went to a friend’s funeral.”
“The funeral of a very dear friend?”
“Not exactly—just a friend.”
“But that should not have had such a disturbing effect on your mind.
Did anything happen at the funeral?”
“I saw a woman there whose eyes frightened me.”
“And why did they frighten you?”
“Because they reminded me of a preacher I used to know when I was a
little girl. He was a revivalist, and I always thought he was crazy. I
went to his meetings, and got terribly worked up, and it frightened me
very much. I thought I would go crazy too, just like the preacher.”
To Doctor Coriat it seemed unnecessary to ask any more questions.
As he saw it, the haunting dread of insanity was nothing but the
continuation in consciousness of the forgotten memory of the childhood
fright, revived by subconscious association of the woman at the funeral
with the preacher whose rabid exhortations had inspired the patient
with such terror. On this theory he utilised the resources of medical
psychology to deprive the baneful memory-image of its power to harm,
and soon had the satisfaction of being able to record a perfect cure.
In another case, successfully treated by Doctor Sidis, the subconscious
persistence of childhood fears actually threatened a young woman with
perhaps lifelong confinement in an asylum for the insane. She had, in
fact, been placed in a New York hospital for observation, and it was
there that Doctor Sidis treated her. According to her relatives, who
did not doubt that she had lost her reason, she suffered from strange
hallucinations, particularly of constantly hearing voices call to her,
and of being killed. She even imagined at times that she was dead, and
would lie in a cataleptic condition, rigidly motionless. At other times
she complained of a painful stiffness in her arms, and of difficulty
in walking.
Testing her psychologically, Doctor Sidis found cause for thinking
that her trouble was hysterical rather than a true insanity involving
brain lesions, and he promptly questioned her relatives regarding her
previous history. She had had, he learned, some exceedingly unpleasant
experiences with a brother-in-law, a rough, brutal fellow, but they
did not seem adequate to account for her various symptoms. These, he
suspected, had their roots farther back in her life, and, although she
professed a total inability to recall any severe fright or worry other
than those associated with her brother-in-law, he remained unshaken in
his suspicion.
“What do you dream about?” he asked her.
“I don’t exactly know,” she replied. “I am sure I dream a good deal,
though, for when I wake I always seem to have been dreaming, and to
have had horrid dreams. All I can say is that I dimly remember seeing
in them many ugly faces.”
“Is your brother-in-law’s face among them?”
“Yes, and other people’s faces. But I’m sure I don’t know who they are.”
Subjected to a special process of “mind tunneling” of Doctor Sidis’s
own invention, the patient recalled a number of dreams in vivid detail.
Most of them showed a strong resemblance to one another, in that
they had as their setting a forest, and as their chief actors men of
repulsive aspect, usually dressed in the roughest of clothing, and
usually intent on capturing the dreamer. Only the night before, she
declared, she had dreamed that a man was trying to choke her, and she
had awakened panic-stricken, and so drenched with perspiration that her
nurse—who corroborated her statement—had had to change her night-gown.
“Can you identify the men of your dreams—the men dressed in rough
clothing who pursue you so fiercely?” Doctor Sidis asked, while she
still was in the artificial state into which he had put her.
“Yes, yes,” she answered, much agitated. “I know them only too well.”
Now, for the first time, she related to him two most significant
episodes of her girlhood. Once, it appeared, when she was hardly nine
years old, she was walking along a country road, past a forest, when a
wood-cutter—“a big man, with big arms and hands projecting from short
sleeves”—tried to catch her and carry her into the forest. “He ran
after me with outstretched arms. I screamed, and ran from him as fast
as I could, calling for help all the time.” And, on another occasion,
when she was even younger—only six—on her way to school through the
woods, a man met her, gave her candy, talked to her nicely, and all at
once seized her so roughly that she began to scream with fright and
pain. At that moment somebody came along, and the man released her and
fled.
These were the men whom she chiefly saw in her dreams; these were
the shocks which, aggravated by the more recent experiences of a not
dissimilar sort with her brother-in-law, were the true determinants
of her hysteria—as was proved by the fact that upon psychological
disintegration of her subconscious memories of them, a speedy and
lasting return to health resulted.
In like manner the seemingly epileptic attacks of a nineteen-year-old
New York “street arab” were found to be nothing more than the external
manifestation of subconscious memory-images, dating back to early
childhood, of nights passed in a dark, damp, terror-inspiring cellar.
The sight of the discoloured corpse of a man who had died from cholera
left in the mind of a sensitive girl of ten such a painful impression
that years afterward, quite unaccountably as it seemed, she developed
an abnormal fear of contracting some deadly disease; and had she not
fortunately been taken to a skilled medical psychologist (Doctor Pierre
Janet) she would almost certainly have ended her days in an asylum. In
the case of an over-worked Boston young man, thought to be suffering
from “dementia praecox,” it was found that his morbid notion that he
had committed an “unpardonable sin” was only a hysterical product
of subconsciously remembered fears of childhood. The victim himself
eventually recognised this, declaring, in an autobiographical statement
made at his physician’s request:
“My abnormal fear certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I
heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly
woman who taught Sunday-school. My early religious thought was chiefly
concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting
me if I was not good enough to be saved.”
Whether or no all cases of functional nervous and mental disease
are thus rooted in emotional stresses of youth, certainly this is
often enough the fact to constitute a serious warning to all who
have anything to do with the upbringing of the young. If fears of
childhood can persist throughout life and can affect adult development
so profoundly as to be causal agents in the production of disease,
it is obvious that parents and educators should adopt every means in
their power to prevent the growth of unreasonable fears in the little
ones in their care. Yet, as matters are to-day, and not least in the
home, most children are subject to influences that tend to foster, not
inhibit, such fears.
In their presence, as was noted on a previous page, parents often
discuss accidents, crimes, sensational doings of all sorts; they betray
a fretfulness, an anxiety, an unrest, that cannot but react on the
sensitive mind of the child, filling it with fears of it knows not
what; they even utilise the fear impulse as a means of coercing the
child into good behaviour; and, what is perhaps worst of all, many
parents intrust their children to ignorant and superstitious nurses,
who take a strange pleasure in “scaring them half to death” with tales
of demons, ghosts and goblins.
Fortunately the majority of people, as a result of later training and
experience, or by the exercise of will-power, are able to suppress the
fears of childhood; but often only at the cost of great mental torture.
Not so long ago I received a letter from a Detroit business man, Mr.
John J. Mitchell, that may well be quoted in this connection. He wrote:
“As a child, as far back as memory goes, I was ‘afraid of the dark,’
intensely afraid.... At about eleven years of age I got a place in a
country store, and perhaps two years later changed to the largest store
in town. This concern did a large, old-fashioned country business,
buying produce and selling all manner of merchandise in exchange or on
credit. This involved the use of two old-time buildings (frame) with
three stories each and a cellar under all. Owing to the character of
the business and location, there were doors opening to the street and
area on each side and rear from every floor, including the cellar,
seven or eight in all, and widely apart, besides windows. It was my
duty at dusk to see that all these doors were properly closed and
barred for the night.... With my childish fear of the dark this daily
task was an ordeal—at times a terrible ordeal.
“I never made complaint or confided my fears to a soul. But for some
reason, the source of which was, and is, as obscure as my intangible
fears, I resolved to cure myself of this terror.... My plan, adopted
and unflinchingly carried out, was to compel myself—a slender, timid
little kid—to go that round daily, in the shadowy dusk, without a light
(which I was privileged to have, a lantern). I can only remember now
the _pain_ of dread and unreasoning apprehension, and the resolution to
‘have it over and done with.’
“I cannot now fix the time when it was accomplished, but in the end I
was completely cured, so that, at least since my majority, I have not
only been relieved of this dread, but I often welcome the folds of
darkness (of night), as if wrapped about with a comforting garment. It
will be a certain qualification to state that, at very long intervals,
and always after some physical or mental strain, I feel momentarily a
fear of return of old impressions in ‘uncanny’ surroundings.”
And, beyond any question, no matter how effectually one may suppress
such youthful fears, so far as relates to their survival in the upper
consciousness, there will always be a subconscious remnant, a buried
complex, ready to emerge and work mischief in one way or another. There
is a world of truth in Professor Angelo Mosso’s emphatic declaration:
“Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given
him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all
his life long.”
If not in such an extreme form as a phobia, or other functional
disease, the early fears will nevertheless make their presence felt in
later life. In some men they may engender lack of self-confidence, and
even a despicable cowardice; in others they may breed superstitious
terrors and usages. Always, in some way, one may depend on it, they
will affect the character, the intellect, the whole moral and mental
make-up.