The Book of Phobias and Manias

in 2018 a team of neuroscientists from Japan, Hong Kong and the US tried an alternative: a therapy for zoophobia that bypasses the conscious mind.

To start with, the researchers used the new technique of ‘hyper-alignment decoding’ of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to identify the brain patterns associated with particular animals in a group of non-phobic people. Armed with these codes, the scientists used the fMRI scanner to monitor the brains of seventeen individuals who each had a phobia of at least two animals. Each participant was shown a grey disc, which grew larger whenever the activity in his or her ventral cortex matched
the pattern of code corresponding to one of those two animals. As an incentive for the subjects to dwell on whatever they were thinking about at those moments, the researchers told them that the bigger the disc, the greater the financial reward they would receive for taking part in the study.

The participants were not consciously thinking of their feared animals when the code was spotted. Even after five sessions, they could not tell which animals had been targeted by the scanner. Nonetheless, their phobia of the targeted creatures, as measured by bodily responses such as skin conductivity, had reduced significantly, while their fear of the control animals remained intact.

‘This study provides evidence,’ say the researchers, ‘that physiological fear responses to specific, subclinical, naturally occurring fears can be reduced unconsciously with hyperalignment decoders, completely outside the awareness of human subjects.’ The zoophobes had learned to associate their once-feared animals with reward, while not knowing that the creatures had even crossed their minds.

A single Viceroy tulip, according to a contemporary writer, was traded for four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tuns of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes, a silver cup and a large quantity of wheat and rye.

In the Journal of Marine Science in 2020, a group of biologists warned that thalassophobia poses a threat to the planet. Our fear of the deep sea, they claim, stops us from fighting to preserve it. The layer of ocean that lies more than 20,000 feet below the surface – named the ‘hadal zone’, after Hades, the ruler of the Greek underworld – is disproportionately harmed by trawling and mining, by the dumping of plastics, sewage and radioactive waste

The Greeks were terrified by Scylla, Charybdis and Hydra, the Norse by the Kraken, and the Japanese by Kappa; Icelandic and Celtic sailors were warned of the Selkies, Peruvians of Yacumama and Polynesians of Taniwha.

In 1989 an American woman in her thirties was overjoyed to discover that there was a name for her condition and that she was not alone in feeling compelled to pull out her hair. She agreed to speak about the disorder on a Seattle radio show, where she mentioned that she had just set up a telephone helpline. When she got home there were 600 messages on her answering machine. ‘People were crying and sobbing and begging for help,’ she said. Over the next week she called everyone back. ‘It was the best therapy I ever had,’ she recalled, ‘because I heard my life coming out of other people’s mouths.’

The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, specified that his veins should be emptied when he died, and his bloodless corpse then burnt. Others took precautions to ensure that they were dead before being buried. The composer Frédéric Chopin left instructions that his body be cut open prior to burial. Hans Christian Andersen, the fairytale writer, left a note by his bedside each night to say that he was not dead but sleeping.

In Prague in the 1910s, Franz Kafka developed a terror of the phone, which seemed to him almost supernatural in its capacity to sever voices from bodies. In Kafka’s short story ‘My Neighbour’, written in 1917, a young businessman imagines that a rival can hear his phone calls through the wall, as if the device has dissolved physical barriers altogether.

An experiment of 2013 tested the effects of different sounds on the brains of mice. The researchers divided the mice into four groups and exposed one group to white noise for two hours a day; one to the cries of baby mice; one to Mozart piano music; and one
to silence. For the rest of the time the mice heard the ambient sounds of the laboratory. The researchers discovered that the mice exposed to silence developed more brain cells than the other groups. They hypothesised that the unusual quiet acted as an alarm, a kind of ‘good stress’ in which the mice – like the uneasy Australian student – were tensely awaiting a noise. ‘The alert elicited by such unnatural silence,’ write the brain scientists, ‘might stimulate neurogenesis as preparation for future cognitive challenges.’ An unfamiliar silence, by generating a state of nervous attention, expanded the mice’s minds.

After her visit, she wondered if she was so disturbed by the chaos of the house because it was a metaphor for the problem that she faced in writing her book. To tell a story about Plath, Malcolm
would need to select stories from the huge, confused jumble of information that she had gathered, throwing out much of what she knew in order to ‘make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger a while among them, rather than to flee’. But for the biographer, as for the hoarder, to discard material is a process of falsification. The house was so troubling to Malcolm because it reminded her of the reality that she was about to betray. Its hoard was ‘unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity’, she writes: ‘a monstrous allegory of truth’.

An American woman detailed similar sensations in an anonymous account of her pyromania in 2001. She had had a difficult childhood, she said: an older stepbrother had sexually abused her
when she was about ten, and her mother suffered from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. ‘Fire became a part of my vocabulary in my preschool days,’ she recalled. ‘During the summers our home would be evacuated because the local mountains were ablaze. I would watch in awe.’ She became obsessed with fires: lighting them, reading about them, watching movies about them, listening to songs about them, discussing them, smelling them. She was enthralled by a fire’s leap and light and power. She set fires, she said, when she felt empty or when she sensed that anxiety was taking her over. ‘I may feel abandoned, lonely or bored,’ she wrote. ‘I sometimes experience severe headaches, a rapid heartbeat, uncontrollable motor movements in my hands, and tingling pain in my right arm.’ The crackle and heat of a fire seemed to burn away her tension.

As a student at the University of California in the spring of 1993, the young woman was caught setting several fires on campus. She was committed to a psychiatric ward but discharged in the summer to take up an internship with a congressional representative in Washington DC. In the eight years since, she had been admitted to hospital another thirty-three times, and variously diagnosed with psychosis, depression, obsessive-compulsive and borderline personality disorders. Her inner world was still lit by fire. ‘My dreams are about fires that I have set, want to set, or wish I had set,’ she wrote. And in her waking hours, she continued to pursue her craving for flames. She felt sadness and anguish when one of her fires was put out, she said, and a yearning to set another fire.