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New Day Cafe: the Top Ten Phobias [1]
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Date: 2022-10-03
The Guardian had recent piece on the top 10 phobias we wacky humans face. I have two relatively mild phobias (claustrophobia and needles), but obviously they can become much more serious.
The Guardian discusses the nature of phobias,
“The causes of these conditions are disputed. We can become phobic after a shock, or just by witnessing the fear of others. Freud proposed that a phobia was a suppressed dread or desire displaced on to an external object. “Phobia particularises anxiety,” observes the literary scholar David Trotter, “to the point at which it can be felt and known in its particularity, and thus counteracted or got around.” Evolutionary psychologists argue that many phobias are adaptive: our fears of heights and snakes are hardwired in our brains to prevent us from falling from heights or being bitten by snakes; our disgust at rats protects us from disease. Evolution may help explain why women are disproportionately phobic, especially in the years in which they can bear children: their heightened caution protects their offspring as well as themselves. But phobias may also seem more common in women because the social environment is more hostile to them, or because their fears are more often dismissed as irrational.
All phobias are cultural creations: the moment at which each one was identified – or invented – marked a change in how we thought about ourselves. When we decide that a particular behaviour is irrational, we mark out our boundaries, indicating the beliefs on which our society is constructed. These borders shift over time, and in a moment of collective crisis – a war, a pandemic – they can change fast.
Phobias may be oppressive, but they also enchant the world around us, making it as scary and vivid as a fairytale. They endow objects or actions with mysterious meaning and give them the power to possess and transform us. They exert a physical hold, like magic, and in doing so reveal our own strangeness.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/3/2126563/-New-Day-Cafe-the-Top-Ten-Phobias
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