Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

A friend recently told me about a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears — gradually cease to provoke you.

Does it work? We can’t know. My friend has a phobia of stuffed animals. It’s something, he says, about the soulless glass eyes. We were talking on the phone, but I could picture him shuddering.

I, meanwhile, feel fine about snakes, jets and needles, but am haunted by heights and clusters. I haven’t seen apps for those, at least not yet.

The phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.

Of all the manifestations of anxiety, specific phobias are by far the most idiosyncratic. About 6 percent of Americans have an acute fear of animals like rats and birds. But after that, the sources of terror are myriad.



Why objects bunched tightly together should send me into states of high alarm, I cannot say. My daughter once festooned a sock puppet with googly eyes from the craft store, and when I encountered it in the house, I reared like a spooked horse. Being a conscientious mother, I managed to conceal my sense of horror, but she has since witnessed my reaction to stands of mushrooms in the woods, and to dandelion buds in the grass.

There is something — some hint of unchecked growth, of aggressive profusion — that I spy in certain geometric arrangements. Could it pertain to disgust, a burgeoning field of research? Might the underlying fear be one of chaos, or of the rapidly multiplying cells in cancer?

Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe not. One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.

There is no accounting, for example, for my friend Patrice’s abiding terror of mascots. Although she cannot swim, she once ran into the ocean fully clothed and shrieking when a man in a gorilla suit attempted to hand her a flier. On another occasion, she switched hotels in Orlando, Fla., to minimize her risk of encountering Mickey Mouse.

One could speculate about Mascot Zero, some clown or chicken who traumatized Patrice in childhood. But it might be entirely untraceable to any sort of triggering event. According to the psychologist Stéphane Bouchard, who studies phobia at the University of Quebec, about a third of phobias are indeed set off by direct exposure to frightening encounters, such as a dog bite. Roughly another third are culturally suggested: a classic example being the increase in shark and water phobias after the movie “Jaws.” With that final third, Mr. Bouchard told me, shrugging, “we just have no clue.”

Let me zero in on that final third.

“I have a fear of honeycomb shapes,” a woman once wrote to me when I solicited examples of phobias for my research. “I can’t look at something like a beehive. The other day, I saw a box of honeycomb-shaped pasta at the grocery store and it really creeped me out.”

Brian Rea

Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”

Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.

The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.

Oddly, this act of transmuting anxiety into fear does possess a kind of logic. Anxiety has been described as fear in search of a cause, and there’s little question that fear is more actionable. Instead of being paralyzed by a sense of directionless menace, as would be the case with a generalized anxiety disorder where danger is everywhere and nowhere, the phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.

In other words, phobia can be a form of compartmentalization.

Aaron Beck, a great thinker about cognitive distortions who founded the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out multiple levels of displacement in phobias. A fear of flying, for instance, can relate to acrophobia (fear of heights), or to claustrophobia, or it can be a stand-in for a much more threatening prospect that dare not be confronted at any cost, such as the death of a parent. You’re avoiding grief, and the next thing you know you would rather be trapped in an elevator with bees than board an airplane. The airplane is departing for another world but no, that’s too obvious.

Related More From Anxiety Read previous contributions to this series.

We are not simple creatures, we human beings, and we know it; yet we still insist on imposing simple explanations upon our emotional conduct. “They’re just freaking dandelions, Mom,” my son tells me. It’s just a garter snake. They’re merely peas. How in the world can you be so idiotically afraid of clowns?

There are wider implications here for our civic and political discourse. Certain people may be neurologically prone to anxiety, true, but fear is also circumstantial. The current economic climate is extremely anxiety-provoking, and research has shown that people can tolerate uncertainty for only so long. At some point, the neurotically wired begin to prefer negative certitudes — or compartmentalized threats — to ambiguity.

If we cannot tolerate uncertainty, then it might be reasonable to expect an increase in phobic behaviors: xenophobia, Islamophobia, Obamafear, a terror of newts. These aren’t stances that can be dealt with by counterargument. They can be quelled only by exposure, by a reminder that the threat is symbolic, a stand-in. Let’s invite the enemy we fear to dine, then, and rescue ourselves from irrational conflict.



Patricia Pearson is a journalist, and the author most recently of “A Brief History of Anxiety … Yours and Mine.” More of her work can be found at her Web site.