PHOBIA. — From Gr. φόβος = fear, a particular form of idea which, untimely and obstinately, despite the subject’s will, intrudes into the course of thought, diverting it to itself, saturated with intense emotional charge and exaggerated fear that the dreaded mental representation may become real or translate into action. Phobia, or emotional obsession, alongside impulsive and intellectual obsession, represents an element in the construction of the picture of “obsessional psychosis” (v.) or psychasthenia.
Doubt and unreasonable fear may have as their object the fear of becoming dirty (τύφοφοβία), or of falling ill, either generally or of a specific disease (πατόφοβία), the anxiety of having to die (ταπατόφοβία), or of being buried alive (ταφόφοβία), or the dread of venturing into vast open spaces (ἀγοράφοβία), or narrow ones (ἐλαστροφοβία), or of blushing out of place (ἐρυθροφοβία), and so on; the psychic importance, frequent in neuro-psychasthenia, may be linked to a phobic mechanism and assume the entire painful psychic symptomatology.
The lucidity of the subject, his inability to free himself alone from the slavery of the obsessive idea, the fact that this usually involves a field scrupulously dear to him, often determine the emotional charge that normally gives tension to the phobia and renders it most painful.
The individual afflicted with phobia is conscious of the morbid nature of the ideo-affective complex that, with exasperating constancy, grips him or periodically assails him; this clearly distinguishes this kind of “lucid madness” from the delirium (v.) proper to degenerative psychoses, paranoia (v.), in which the lack of awareness of the abnormality of the parasitic idea reveals the defect of the higher faculties of the mind and constitutes the character of mental illness (v. MENTALI). On the contrary, the psychic activities of the phobic individual proceed orderly and effectively, without suffering damage from the painful parasitism of his particular phobia.
For moral and juridical evaluation, V. PSICOSI OSSESSIVA.