An Analysis of Fear

It is time to reflect. We seek obviously for insight into the nature of fear, for an "either---or" which will separate truth from error. This, however, is difficult, for fear itself is not easily comprehended. Hitherto we have attained nothing but contradictions between which no choice is possible. I now propose something different. Without bias we will assemble everything which may be said of fear and at the same time give up the expectation of a close synthesis.

Fear or anxiety in the first place is something felt and we call it an affective state, although we do not know what an affect is. As a feeling it obviously is of the painful type but this does not exhaust its quality. Not every painful sensation is fear, for there are others (tensions, pain, grief), so that as a painful quality fear must have something special. We may ask: Is it possible to comprehend differences between these various painful affects? From the sensation of fear we can always deduce something. Its pain has a special note and while we cannot prove this it is probable and would not be striking. From this peculiar quality so difficult to isolate we note the fear of certain somatic sensations which we refer to different organs. We are not interested here in the physiology of fear and will be satisfied to isolate individual representatives of this sensation and the most frequent and evident have to do with the respiratory organs and the heart. They are to us proofs that the motor innervation (discharge processes) take part in the totality of fear. Hence the analysis of the fear stage gives us (1) a specific pain character; (2) a discharge reaction; and (3) perception of the same. Points 2 and 3 at once give us a distinction between fear on the one hand and grief and pain.

In the two latter there is no motor expression; where they are at hand they separate themselves distinctly not as constituents of the whole but as consequents or reactions. Fear is then a special state of pain with discharge reactions along definite paths. According to our general views we shall believe that fear is based on increased excitation which on the one hand gives it its character of pain and on the other relieves itself through discharge. But this purely physiological comprehension will hardly suffice. We are tempted to assume the existence of a historical factor which unites the sensations with the innervations. In other words, the state of fear is the reproduction of an experience which contains the conditions of an increase of irritation and leads off along certain paths whereby the pain of fear receives its specific character. As such a visualized experience birth in mankind presents itself, and therefore we are inclined to see in a fear state a reproduction of the birth trauma.

At the same time we have not maintained that fear is an exception in this respect as compared with other affective states. We believe that other affects are also reproductions of old experiences which are important to life and perhaps preindividual, and we adduce them as general, typical, congenital hysterical attacks in comparison with late and individually acquired attacks of hysterical neurosis, the genesis and importance of which have through analysis become distinct. Naturally it would be very desirable to be able to carry this notion out for a series of other affects in a demonstrable fashion but at present we are far removed from this prospect.

Reference of fear back to the birth trauma must defend itself against objections which are close at hand. Fear is probably a reaction experienced by all animals although only the mammals experience labor and it is questionable whether the latter is a trauma with them. There is therefore fear without the prototype of birth. But this objection is outside the limits between biology and psychology. Just because fear has a biologically indispensable function to fulfil, as a reaction to the condition of danger it may be arranged in different fashions for different creatures. We do not therefore know whether in the creatures far removed from man there is the same content in sensations and innervations as in mankind. This does not, however, prevent fear from being a prototype of the birth process in man. If this be the structure and origin of fear, a further question is, What is its function? Under what circumstances is it reproduced? The answer seems near at hand and convincing. Fear is a reaction to a state of danger and is reproduced regularly when such a state reappears.

There is something else to note. The innervation of the original fear state was probably characterized by feeling and was purposeful, quite as with the muscle actions of the first hysterical attack. If one would explain the hysterical attack one need only to seek the situation in which the movements concerned were part of an authorized action. So probably during labor the direction of the innervation upon the respiratory organs prepares the activity of the lungs, the acceleration of the heart-beat works against the poisoning of the blood. This efficiency naturally fails in the later reproduction of the fear state as an affect, as it is also missed in the repeated hysterical seizure. If, then, the individual engages in a new situation of danger it can readily become unsuitable to answer by a fear state, the reaction to a former danger, in place of that of the now adequate reaction. The utility again appears when the danger situation is recognized as approaching and as signalized by the outbreak of fear. The fear can then be disposed of through suitable measures. Hence two possibilities separate themselves in the appearance of fear: one, unsuitable, in a new situation of danger, and the other suitable for signalling and preventing danger.

But what is a danger? In the act of birth there exists an objective danger to the preservation of life; we know what it imports in reality, but psychologically it tells us nothing. The danger from birth has as yet no psychic content. We certainly may not presuppose that the fetus has any kind of knowledge that it is in danger of annihilation. The fetus can do no more than perceive a wholesale disturbance in the economy of its narcistic libido. Large quantities of excitations penetrate to it and generate a new series of unpleasant situations; many organs are forced to heightened fixations constituting a prelude to the soon to begin object-investments. What among these find evaluation as a characteristic of a danger situation?

Unfortunately we know far too little of the psychic comprehension of the new-born to answer this question directly. I cannot even concede the utility of the above depiction. It is easy to say that the new-born will repeat the fear affect in all situations which recall to it the event of birth. However, the decisive point remains, what is recalled, and how.

Hardly anything remains but to study the occasions in which the nursling or older child shows itself to be prepared for fear. In his book on the birth trauma, Rank[5] makes an energetic effort to demonstrate the relations of the earliest phobias of the child to the impression of the event of birth, but I do not regard this as fortunate.

One may make two objections to this view: First, that it rests on a presupposition that the infant has definite sense impressions, especially those of a visual nature, received during birth and renewed in memory of the birth trauma, thus producing the fear reaction. This assumption is fully unproved and devoid of probability, and it is not credible that the child at birth has anything beyond tactile and general sensibility. If it later shows fear of small animals as they vanish into holes or emerge from the same, Rank explains this reaction through the perception of an analogy which, however, could not become striking to a child. Second, Rank, in the evaluation of this later fear situation according to the requirement of the recollection of the happy intrauterine life or of its traumatic interruption, leaves the door open to any kind of arbitrary interpretation. Individual cases of child fear are directly opposed to the application of Rank's principle. If the infant is brought into darkness and solitude we should expect that it would accept this restoration of the intrauterine situation as gratification. If the fact that it reacts to this very situation with fear is referred back to the recollection of the disturbance of its happiness by birth one can no longer ignore the forced character of the interpretation.

I must draw the conclusion that the earliest child phobias do not permit of a direct transference to the impression made by the act of birth, and thus far they have withdrawn themselves from explanation. A certain predisposition to fear is unmistakable in the nursling. It is not at its worst directly after birth, to decrease slowly, but appears during psychic evolution and persists through a certain period of childhood. When such early phobias extend beyond this period they awake the suspicion of a neurotic disturbance, although their relationship to the later distinct neuroses of childhood is obscure.

Only a few cases of the expression of child fear are intelligible to us and we must limit ourselves to them. When the child is alone, in the dark, and when it finds a stranger in place of its mother, all three states reduce themselves to one condition, absence of the loved and longed for person. But from here on the way to understanding fear and to reconciling the contradictions which seem associated, is free.

The memory picture of the person longed for is certainly intense, probably at first hallucinatorily fixed. But this has no consequence and now it appears as if this longing changes to fear. There is exactly the impression as if this fear is the expression of perplexity, as if the undeveloped creature knew nothing better than to start with this yearning fixation. The fear appears as a reaction to missing the object and there is forced on us the analogy that castration fear has also the content of separation from a highly prized object and that the original fear (the primary fear of birth) arises from separation from the mother.

The next consideration leads to the emphasis of the loss of the object. If the nursling longs to behold the mother it is only because it knows from experience that she satisfies all its requirements without delay. The situation which it evaluates as fear and against which it would be assured is one of unsatisfaction, the increase in the requirement tension, against which it is powerless. I mean that from this point of view on, everything is arranged; the situation of unsatisfaction attains a painful height from the mass of stimulus and does not find itself overmastered by psychic employment or discharge. For the nursling this must be analogous to the experience of birth, the repetition of the danger situation. Common to both is the economic disturbance through the increase of the mass of stimulation demanding discharge.

This factor is the essential nucleus of the danger. In both cases the fear reaction appears, having shown itself already in the nursling as useful, since the direction of the discharge upon the respiratory and vocal musculature summons the mother, just as formerly the lung activity did away with internal irritation. From its birth the child does not need to maintain more than this characterization of danger.

With the experience that an external object comprehended through perception can make an end to the dangerous warning situation, the content of danger now displaces itself from the economic situation to its condition, the loss of the object. To miss the mother is now the danger at the appearance of which the child gives the fear signal, even before the economic situation has appeared. This transformation signifies the first great advance in the impulse toward self-preservation and at the same time it includes the transition from the automatically unwilled new origin of fear to its intentional reproduction as the signal of danger.

In both respects, as an automatic phenomenon and as a rescuing signal, fear shows itself as the product of the psychic helplessness of the nursling which is the self-evident counterpart of its biological helplessness. The striking coincidence that birth fear as well as nursling fear recognize the condition of separation from the mother needs no psychological explanation. It is explained biologically simply enough from the fact that the mother has soothed all the demands of the child before birth and partly continues to do so after delivery. Intrauterine life and earliest childhood represent far more of a continuum than the striking censure of the act of birth allows us to believe. The psychic mother-object replaces to the child the biological fetal situation. We must therefore not forget that in intrauterine life the mother was no object and that at that time there was no object.

It is easily seen that in this connection there is no room for reacting off the birth trauma and that another function of fear as a signal for avoiding danger is not to be found. The fear condition of the loss of the object carries us still further. The next transformation of fear, the castration fear which develops in the phallic phase, is a fear of separation bound to the same condition. The danger here is separation from the genitals. A thought train from Ferenczi which seems fully justified allows us to recognize distinctly the line of the connection with the former content of the danger situation. The high narcistic valuation of the penis can rest on this, that the possession of this organ contains the danger of a reunion with the mother (mother substitute) in the act of coitus. Deprivation of this member is as good as a fresh separation from the mother, thus again indicating an unpleasurable requirement tension (as in birth) to be delivered helpless. This requirement, the increase of which is feared, is, however, only a specialized one, that of the genital libido, and is no longer an optional one as in the nursing period. I add here that the fancy of return within the mother's womb is the substitute coitus of the impotent (inhibited by the castration threat). In Ferenczi's sense one may say that the individual who will allow himself to represent the return into the womb with his genital organ, replaces this organ regressively by his entire person.

The progress in the development of the child, the increase of its independence, the acute separation of his psychic apparatus in several instances, the appearance of new needs cannot remain without influence on the content of the danger situation. We have followed this transformation from the loss of the mother object to castration and see the next step caused by the might of the super-ego. With the depersonalization of the parental instance, from which one fears the castration, the danger becomes more definite. Castration fear develops into conscience fear and social fear. It is now no longer easy to say what is feared. The formula of separation, exclusion from the herd, applies only to that later portion of the super-ego which has developed from leaning upon social prototypes, and not to the nucleus of the super-ego, which corresponds to an introjected parental instance. More generally expressed, it is the anger, the punishment of the super-ego, the loss of love from that side which the ego values as danger and answers with the fear signal. As the last transformation of this fear of the super-ego is the fear of death (life), fear of the projection of the super-ego into the power of destiny as it appears.

Formerly I placed a certain value on the presentation that it is the fixation withdrawn in repression which the application experiences as conducting off the fear. This view now seems to me hardly worth while. The difference lies here, that formerly I believed that fear always arose automatically through an economic process, while the present conception of fear as a signal intended to influence the pleasure-pain factor makes us independent of this economic compulsion. There is, of course, nothing to be said against the assumption that the ego utilizes this very energy which is set free in the diversion of repression to arouse the affect, but it becomes unimportant with what portion of the energy this takes place.

Another proposition which I have expressed now demands retesting in the light of our new comprehension. This is the assertion that the ego is the actual seat of fear.

In my opinion this will be shown to be correct. We have no occasion to impute to the super-ego any kind of an expression of fear. If, however, one speaks of a fear of the It there is no contradiction implied but one must correct a clumsy expression. Fear is an affective state which naturally can be felt only by the ego. The It cannot have fear like the ego; it has no organization and is unable to judge a danger situation. On the other hand, it is a frequent occurrence for processes to be prepared or completed in the It which give occasion to the ego for the development of fear. In fact, the probably earliest repressions with the majority of the later ones are motivated through fear of the ego towards individual processes in the It. We differentiate here, again with good reason, the two processes which occur in the It. One activates the danger situation for the ego and moves it to give the fear signal for inhibition; and the other prepares in the It a situation analogous to the birth trauma, in which it comes automatically to a fear reaction. The two are brought nearer to each other when one emphasizes that the second corresponds to the first and original danger situation; the first, however, is one of the later ones derived from its fear conditions. Or, referred to affections which actually occur, that the second process is realized in the etiology of the actual neuroses while the first remains characteristic for the psychoneuroses.

We now see that we do not need to depreciate former communications but merely to bring them into association with the more recent. It is not to be denied that in abstinence, or abusive disturbance in the course of sexual excitement, resulting in a diversion of the same from its psychic elaboration, fear may originate directly from the libido; that is, that condition of helplessness of the ego against an over great requirement tension is produced, which as in birth proceeds from fear development. We see that upon the foundation of these actual neuroses psychoneuroses may easily develop; that is to say, the ego makes an effort to spare the fear, which it has learned to keep for a time in suspense and bind it by symptom formation. Probably analysis of the traumatic war neuroses, which term indeed comprises very different affections, would show that a number of these share the characteristics of actual neuroses.

As we presented the development of the different danger situations from the original birth prototype, it is far from our intention to maintain that every later fear condition merely sets the predecessor out of power. The progress of ego development contributes indeed to the depreciation of the former fear situation and shoves it aside, so that one may say that a certain fear condition must be assigned as adequate to a definite age of development. The danger of psychic helplessness fits in with the time of life of the immaturity of the ego, just as the danger of loss of the object belongs to the early years of childhood, the castration danger to the phallic stage, and fear of the super-ego to the period of latency. But it can also happen that all these danger situations and fear conditions coexist side by side and can cause the ego to react with fear at periods later than those adequate or that several of them may step into activity simultaneously. Possibly closer relations may exist between the actual danger situation and the form of the subsequent neurosis.[6]

In an earlier portion of these investigations we came upon the importance of the castration danger in more than one neurotic affection, and we imparted the warning not to overemphasize this factor, for it might not work out in the neuroses to which women are known to be more predisposed. We now see that we are not in danger if we explain castration fear as the sole motif for the defensive processes which lead to the neurosis. In another place I have explained how the development of the little girl is directed by the castration complex to a tender object fixation. It is exactly in women that the danger situation of the loss of the object appears to be the most efficacious. We may adduce the small modification in their fear condition, that it is no longer a matter of missing or of the real loss of the object but of the loss of love by reason of the object. As it is certain that hysteria has a great affinity for femaleness as the compulsive neurosis has for maleness, the presumption would be that the fear condition of the loss of love plays a rôle in hysteria which is analogous to that of castration threat in the phobias, and the fear of the super-ego in the compulsive neuroses.