PHOBIA. - From the Greek φόβος = fear, a particular form of idea that untimely, obstinately, in spite of the subject's will, becomes lodged in the course of thought, diverting it to itself, saturated with an intense emotional charge and with an exaggerated fear that the deprecated mental representation may become real or be translated into action. The phobia, or emotional obsession, alongside impulsive obsession and intellectual obsession, represents a constitutive element of the picture of "obsessive psychosis" (v.) or psychasthenia.
The doubt and the unreasonable fear may have as their object the fear of soiling oneself (rupophobia), or of falling ill, generically or with a well-determined disease (pathophobia), or the anxiety of having to die (thanatophobia), or of being buried alive (taphophobia), or the dismay of venturing into vast open places (agoraphobia), or into narrow ones (claustrophobia), or of blushing out of place (ereuthophobia), and so on; psychic impotence, frequent in neuropsychasthenia, may be linked to a phobic mechanism and take on its 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 idea usually invests a field scrupulously dear to him, determines and explains the emotional charge that normally gives tension to the phobia and makes it most painful.
The individual affected by phobia is conscious of the abnormality of the idea-affect complex that with exasperating constancy binds him and periodically assails him; this clearly distinguishes this species of "lucid madness" from the delirium (v.) proper to degenerative psychoses, of the paranoia type (v.), in which the lack of consciousness of the abnormality of the parasitic idea reveals the defect of the higher faculties of the mind and establishes the character of mental illness (v. MENTAL DISEASES). On the contrary, the psychic activities of the phobic unfold in an orderly and effective manner, without suffering harm from the painful parasitism of his particular phobia.
For the moral and juridical evaluation, v. OBSESSIVE PSYCHOSIS.
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Giuseppe de Nismo