FEAR AND SUPERSTITION
An individual limited in intelligence, leading a narrow life, is
specially subject to fear suggestions which can be easily aroused.
Inhibitions of the personal self are produced by stimulation of
the fear instinct with consequent easy access, by means of fear
suggestions, to man’s subconscious fear instinct, thus inducing
various forms of morbid mental life.
When a person is limited in his interests, when he is ignorant
and full of prejudices and superstitions, his critical, personal
sense is embryonic, and the predisposition to fear suggestions is
specially pronounced. He easily falls a victim to all kinds of
bizarre beliefs and absurd superstitions, such as the mysticism
which obsesses uncultured classes of all ages.
The optimistic, “metaphysical” beliefs, rampant in this country,
are all due to the beggarly intelligence subconsciously obsessed
by innumerable fear suggestions. Neurotic adherents cling to their
irrational optimism in order to assuage the pangs, caused by the
fear instinct, from which they are unable to free themselves.
In the embryonic personality of the child, as well as in the
undeveloped or narrowed individuality of the adult, the sense of
the strange, of the unknown, and of the mysterious, is apt to
arouse the fear instinct. In fact, the unfamiliar arouses the fear
instinct even in the more highly organized mind.
“Any new uncertainty,” says Bain, “is especially the cause of
terror. Such are the terrors caused by epidemics, the apprehensions
from an unexperienced illness, the feeling of a recruit under fire.
The mental system in infancy is highly susceptible, not merely
to pain, but to shocks and surprises. Any great excitement has a
perturbing effect allied to fear. After the child has contracted
a familiarity with the persons and things around it, it manifests
unequivocal fear on the occurrence of anything strange. The grasp
of an unknown person often gives a fright. This early experience
resembles the manifestations habitual to the inferior animals.”
In another place Bain rightly says, “Our position in the world
contains the sources of fear. The vast powers of nature dispose of
our lives and happiness with irresistible might and awful aspect.
Ages had elapsed ere the knowledge of law and uniformity prevailing
among those powers was arrived at by the human intellect. The
profound ignorance of the primitive man was the soil wherein his
early conceptions and theories sprang up; and the fear inseparable
from ignorance gave them their character. The essence of
susperstition is expressed by the definition of fear.”
Compayré, in speaking of the fear of the child, says, “In his
limited experience of evil, by a natural generalization, he
suspects danger everywhere like a sick person whose aching body
dreads in advance every motion and every contact. He feels that
there is a danger everywhere, behind the things that he cannot
understand, because they do not fit in with his experience.
“The observations collected by Romanes in his interesting studies
on the intelligence of animals throw much light on this question;
they prove that dogs, for instance, do not fear this or that,
except as they are ignorant of the cause. A dog was very much
terrified one day when he heard a rumbling like thunder produced by
throwing apples on the floor of the garret; he seemed to understand
the cause of the noise as soon as he was taken to the garret, and
became as quiet and happy as ever.
“Another dog had a habit of playing with dry bones. One day Romanes
attached a fine thread which could hardly be seen, to one of the
bones, and while the dog was playing with it, drew it slowly
towards him; the dog recoiled in terror from the bone, which seemed
to be moving of its own accord. So skittish horses show fright as
long as the cause of the noise that frightens them remains unknown
and invisible to them.
“It is the same with the child. When in the presence of all the
things around him, of which he has no idea, these sounding objects,
these forms, these movements, whose cause he does not divine, he is
naturally a prey to vague fears. He is just what we should be, if
chance should cast us suddenly into an unexplored country before
strange objects and strange beings--suspicious, always on the _qui
vive_, disposed to see imaginary enemies behind every bush, fearing
a new danger at every turn in the road.”
Similarly, Sully says, “The timidity of childhood is seen in the
readiness with which experience invests objects and places with
a fear-exciting aspect, in its tendency to look at all that is
unknown as terrifying, and in the difficulty of the educator in
controlling these tendencies.”
Sully is right in thinking that education tends greatly to reduce
the early intensity of fear. “This it does by substituting
knowledge for ignorance, and so undermining that vague terror
before the unknown to which the child and the superstitious
savage are a prey, an effect aided by the growth of will power
and the attitude of self-confidence which this brings with it.”
An uncultivated personality with a limited mental horizon, with a
narrow range of interests, a personality trained in the fear of
mysterious agencies, is a fit subject for obsessions.
In certain types of functional psychosis and neurosis the patient
has an inkling of the fear instinct in his dread of objects, or of
states of mind, lack of confidence, blushing, expectations of some
coming misfortune and some mysterious evil, but he is not aware of
the fear instinct as developed in him by the events and training of
early childhood. _The fears of early childhood are subconscious._
At any rate, the patient does not connect them with his present
mental affection.
In other types of psychopathic affections the patient is entirely
unaware of the whole situation, he is engrossed by the symptoms
which he regards as the sum and substance of his trouble;
the fear is entirely subconscious. Frights, scares, dread of
sickness, instructions associated with fear of the mysterious and
unseen, injunctions with fear of punishment or failure in moral
standards, enforcement of social customs with dread of failure
and degradation,--all go to the cultivation of the fear instinct
which in later life becomes manifested as _functional psychosis_ or
_neurosis_.
_Functional psychosis or neurosis is an obsession, conscious and
subconscious, of the fear instinct._ Thus one of my patients
became obsessed with fear of tuberculosis, manifesting most of the
symptoms of “consumption,” after a visit to a tubercular friend.
Another patient was obsessed by the fear of death after visiting a
sick relative of his in one of the city hospitals. Another became
obsessed with the fear of syphilis after having been in contact
with a friend who had been under antiluetic treatment. Still
another of my patients, in addition to the fear of darkness, became
obsessed with the fear of stars, and also with a fear of comets,
regarded by some people as poisoning the air with noxious gases.
In all such cases anxiety and dread were present, but in none of
the patients have I found an insight into the real state of the
mind. In all of them the fear was traced to early childhood, to
early experiences of the fear instinct, fostered and fortified by
unfavorable conditions. In all of those fears there was a long
history of a well-developed _subconscious fear instinct_.
I may assert without hesitation that in all my cases of functional
psychosis, I find the presence of the fear instinct to be the sole
cause of the malady. _Take away the fear and the psychosis or
neurosis disappears._
The fear instinct arises from the impulse of self-preservation
without which animal life cannot exist. The fear instinct is one of
the most primitive and most fundamental of all instincts. Neither
hunger, nor sex, nor maternal instinct, nor social instinct can
compare with the potency of the fear instinct, rooted as it is in
self-preservation,--the condition of life primordial.
When the instinct of fear is at its height, it sweeps before it
all other instincts. Nothing can withstand a panic. Functional
psychosis in its full development is essentially a panic,--it
is the emergence of the most powerful of all instincts, the fear
instinct.
Functional psychosis or neurosis is a veiled form of the fear of
death, of destruction, of loss of what is deemed as essential to
life, of fear of some unknown, impending evil. How many times has
it fallen to my share to soothe and counteract the fear instinct of
panic-stricken psychopathic patients! A psychogenetic examination
of every case of functional psychosis brings one invariably to the
fundamental fear instinct.
Conflicts, repressions, imperfections, sex-complexes,
sex-aberrations, and others do not produce psychopathic symptoms or
neurotic states. It is only when mental states become associated
with an exaggerated impulse of self-preservation and an intensified
fear instinct that neurosis arises.
A close study of every neurotic case clearly discloses the
_primary_ action of those two important factors of life
activity,--self-preservation and fear instinct.