In this unit you will learn how to

8. After he lost his job he worried that he would become __________.

Fear

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reading skill



Reading comprehension

The history of Phobias

Phobias are actually rich, varied, and complex. We know that people have had phobias for thousands of years. But it’s only been recently that we’ve known much about those fears—or even known enough to call them by the term phobias. The first written reference to phobic problems that we have is in the works of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (470-410 B.C.E.). Hippocrates wrote about the many ailments and problems of his patients, and we can still read many of his volumes of observations today. In one his works (called The Seventh Book of Epidemics), Hippocrates described a condition in a man named Nicanor. But Hippocrates didn’t actually come up with the term phobia. That word wasn’t used until nearly 500 years later, when a Roman doctor, Celsus, used the word hydrophobia (literally, water fear) to describe someone who seemed to have a horror of water due to rabies. (People with advanced rabies may have tremendous thirst but be unable to drink and averse to water.)

Phobos was the son of Aries, the Greek god of war. The story goes that Phobos was a frightening and formidable guy—so much so that warriors would paint his picture on their shields to give their enemies a real fright and to get them to run away in terror. So a phobic reaction resembles someone terrified of something The first relatively modern use of the word phobia wasn’t until 1786, when (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) an unknown writer in the Columbian Magazine defined the word as meaning “A fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue fear of a real one.”

In our modern era, accustomed as we are to knowing the psychological facts about ourselves and others (for example, are you an introvert or an extrovert? you probably have an opinion about the subject!), it may surprise you to know that just over a hundred years ago, there were no clear, tidy categories for psychological problems. So your phobia might have been ignored or misunderstood as some vague kind of craziness, but nobody would have been able to tell you much about it. In 1895 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), a Viennese neurologist who founded the science of psychoanalysis, noticed that while some things squick (gross out) most people at least a little (such as snakes, death, or getting sick), other things only bother a few people (such as fear of leaving the house). In the 1960s, it was observed that phobias basically divide themselves into three rather different kinds or categories: agoraphobia, social phobia, and specific phobias. That set the stage for the phobia classifications that we still use today.

As you’ll see phobias make a great deal of sense from the perspective of survival. In fact, it may be that the same things that create phobias also ensured that our species survived long enough so that you could be reading this!


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Fear



listening skill