What is fear? The main types of fear. Counseling Psychologist

What is fear? The main types of fear. Counseling Psychologist

Fear needs no introduction, and each of us knows from experience that experience. However, it neurotics tend to fear much more than others. There is no doubt that the problem of fear - the central point, which converge the most important issues of mental life, both in norm and in pathology.

Ever since the days of Freud, the fear can be divided into real fear and neurotic.

The real fear is for us than it is quite rational and understandable: it is a reaction to the perception of external danger. As such, this fear is reasonable and serves a signal function: the danger is close, get ready for defense or escape.

Is very widespread feeling of fear and the tendency of people to react fear in many situations is partly due to the presence of psychoanalysis in the psyche of the core fear that is relevant to the early impression of a man. This, above all, the impressions of the act of birth, which is a massive integration of unpleasant experiences, which becomes the prototype of the impact of mortal danger and has since been repeated to us as a state of fear.

Psychoanalysis also recognizes the very significant that the first state of fear has arisen as a result of separation from the mother.

With regard to neurotic fear, here, there are several forms of it.

Firstly, the so-called free fear, ready to bind to any more or less suitable representation. It's pointless or bezobektny fear. This fear is called "fear of expectations" or "fearful expectation." People suffering from this fear, always ready for the worst, they live in anticipation of misfortune. Freud described this state of anxiety neurosis.

The second form of fear, as opposed to just described, mentally more connected and connected to certain objects or situations. It is a fear in the form of an extremely diverse and often very strange phobias. Some of the objects and situations that inspire fear among neurotics and normal people, is something terrible and are related to risk, and therefore these phobias seem to us clear, though exaggerated by its strength. For example, widespread fear of reptiles: snakes, frogs, as well as mice, rats, etc. Or fears associated with the risk of flying on an airplane and drive a car. However, what strikes us in these phobias neurotic - so it's not so much of their content, how much intensity. Fear of phobias just indescribable!

There is another group of phobias, which are generally difficult to understand rationally. As such can be considered irrational fear of open or closed spaces, or many phobias of animals.

At this point, there are several important issues. Is it possible to neurotic fear, in which risk plays no role, and link with the real fear is always a reaction to danger? And how should we understand the neurotic fear?

Productive, apparently, is the assumption that where there is fear, has to be something that people fear.

Clinical psychoanalysis finds a causal connection between the processes in the sexual life and the state of fear. Under certain conditions (the practice was interrupted sexual intercourse, sexual abstinence, etc.), sexual arousal disappears, and instead it appears the fear in various forms. Libido (sexual arousal) is replaced by fear.

Thus, psychologists - analysts say that the neurotic fear I am a patient tries to escape from the demands of their sexual desires, treating this request as a threat. However, under the influence of psychological defenses (eg, displacement, projection, and offset) the risk is perceived as internal, but as coming from outside: forming one or other phobia.

Freud likened the phobia from the trenches against external danger, which actually is a fearsome sexual desire.