Concept
Phobia
Overview
anxiety disorder defined by a persistent and excessive fear of a concept, an object or a situation
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Phobia is discussed.
As a first attempt to take one’s bearings in this chaos we may divide them into three groups. Many of the objects and situations feared are rather sinister, even to us normal people, they have some connection with danger; and these phobias are not entirely incomprehensible to us, although their intensity seems very much exaggerated. Most of us, for instance, have a feeling of repulsion upon encountering a snake. It…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
names the idea; states what it is
To return to the phobias, I may now say that you realize how insufficient it would be to explain only their content, to be interested only in knowing that this or that object or situation is made the subject of a phobia. The content of the phobia has about the same importance for it as the manifest dream facade has for the dream.
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
names the idea; opens on it
The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia with trembling) are protective measures against the repetition of the anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which these symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms, on the contrary, which simply express the situation at the moment of the explosion (innervation, position of the body) are conversion-hysterias in the…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
states what it is; names the idea
The property of causing such a cycle of occurrences is called "discomfort"; the property of the mental occurrences in which the cycle ends is called "pleasure." The actions constituting the cycle must not be purely mechanical, i.e. they must be bodily movements in whose causation the special properties of nervous tissue are involved.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
states what it is; author linked in the graph
Dr. Watson has found only two original stimuli to fear in young infants, namely loud noises, and lack of support; but anything associated with either of these may become terrifying. The separation of an emotional element in our integral reaction to a situation is more or less artificial. No doubt there is a definite physiological concomitant, namely stimulation of a gland; but fear, for example, involves a mode of…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
author linked in the graph
Philosophers who discussed Phobia
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Place in the tradition
Part of Behaviorism.