FOBIA. — From the Greek φόβος = fear, a particular form of idea that, untimely and obstinately, against the subject’s will, inserts itself into the course of thought, diverting it toward itself, saturated with an intense emotional charge and exaggerated fear that the deprecated mental representation might become real or be translated into action. F. or emotional obsession, alongside impulsive obsession and intellectual obsession, constitutes an element in the construction of the picture of « obsessive psychosis » (v.) or psychasthenia.
The doubt and unreasonable fear may have as their object the fear of becoming dirty (rupophobia), or of falling ill, generically or with a specific disease (pathophobia), the anxiety of having to die (thanatophobia), or of being buried alive (taphophobia), or the dread of venturing into vast open spaces (agoraphobia), or confined ones (clanatrophobia), or of blushing inappropriately (erethophobia), and so forth; psychic impotence, frequent in neuropsychasthenia, may be linked to a phobic mechanism and assume all its distressing psychic symptomatology.
The subject’s lucidity, his inability to free himself unaided from the enslavement of the obsessive idea, and the fact that this idea usually invades a sphere he holds particularly dear, determine and explain the emotional charge that normally gives tension to f. and makes it extremely painful.
The individual suffering from f. is conscious of the abnormality of the ideational-affective complex that, with exasperating constancy, holds him in its grip and periodically assails him; this clearly distinguishes this species of « lucid insanity » from delusion (v.), characteristic of degenerative psychoses, paranoia (v.), in which the absence of awareness of the abnormality of the parasitic idea reveals the defect of the mind’s higher faculties and establishes the character of mental illness (v. MALATTIE). On the contrary, the phobic individual’s psychic activities proceed in an orderly and effective manner, without suffering damage from the painful parasitism of his particular f.
For moral and legal assessment, V. PSICOSI OSSESSIVA.
BISL.: O. Bumke, Trattato di psichiatria, Turin 1927; U. Cerleni, Rissunato delle lezioni di clinica delle malattie nervose e mentali, Rome 1946; G. Moglie, Manuale di psichiatria, there 1946; A. V. Nager, Tratado di psichiatria, Barcellona 1949.
Giuseppe de Nismo