Word: phobias
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Little Hans. How does a man become anxious to the point of phobia or compulsion? After decades of debate psycholo gists and psychiatrists are at last substantially agreed that anxiety arises from feelings of helplessness.* According to the best modern thinking, Freud never fully understood the essential nature of anxiety. His first theory, propounded in 1894, was that repressed libido (sexual energy) becomes anxiety, which later reappears as free-floating anxiety or a symptom (phobia or compulsion) that is equivalent to it. This, as critics pointed out, was a theory of mechanism and not an explanation of causes...
Logically enough, considering the environment, the phobias most often found in U.S. metropolitan areas have to do with high places, airplanes and dirt. Fear of heights is not a serious matter if it involves only skyscrapers: an occasional high-steel worker or window-washer has to change his job because of this. But many people, as they grow older, become neurotically cautious, get to the stage where they cannot even go near a window above the ground floor. In such severe cases, the anxiety usually extends far beyond this symptom and pervades the whole personality. Airplanes evoke a comparable phobia...
...anxiety in the U.S. But there is a strong suggestion that The Bomb is merely a handy device, welcomed almost with relief, for the release of anxiety and guilt that have little to do with the subject as such. For many Bomb worriers, it seems to be a true phobia, a kind of secular substitute for the Last Judgment, and a truly effective nuclear ban would undoubtedly deprive them of a highly comforting sense of doom...
...good accompanists seem to share Moore's enthusiasm, documented wittily if somewhat defensively in his 1944 book, The Unashamed Accompanist. England's Ivor Newton explains his passion for accompanying as resulting from "a phobia about being alone." Italy's Giorgio Favoretto is less interested in togetherness than in "uniting the arts of poetry and music," while France's Janopoulo confesses to lacking the "special soul and the kind of conviction that passes across the footlights." Whatever its appeal, accompanying has attracted first-rate pianists, among them the U.S.'s Paul Ulanowsky and Franz Rupp, England...
...Kremlin is apparently worried about too much exposure to Western ways. First came the spy phobia, designed to discourage too much fraternizing with the waves of Western tourists to Russia. Now comes a Soviet fear that even in the process of learning English, Russian youngsters may be subtly corrupted. The result is reported in the current Columbia University Forum by Stephen Viederman, deputy chairman of the U.S.'s Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants. Where Russia's English texts once merely gushed over the joys of Soviet life, they have now been revised to ensure that students...