Word: phobics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...European neighbors'. The big worry, also as usual, is rising inflation: though prices increased a mere 2.6% in 1978, inflation so far this year has been running at an annual rate of 7.4%, a figure that might be cheered elsewhere but is regarded with concern in this inflation-phobic nation. German exports are surging and now account for fully 12% of total world trade-the same...
Therapists also differ widely about how the condition should be treated. The most common technique is behavior modification; its use is based on the assumption that agoraphobia is a habit to be broken. Treatment consists of gradually exposing the phobic patient to feared sit uations, first by having him imagine them, then by forcing him, for instance, to take longer and longer solo walks until the stress disappears. A more drastic technique, similar to throwing a baby into a pool to teach it how to swim, is known as "implosion"?a patient might be driven to a large empty...
Freudians, of course, do just that. In their view, agoraphobia, like all phobias, is a symbolic expression of deeply threatening sexual and/or aggressive urges. One difference, says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Walter Stewart, is that agoraphobics are "generally angrier and sicker" than other phobics. Why are most agoraphobics female? Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson believes that men generally deal with anxiety by compulsively facing it. "If they are afraid of violence, they may become addicted to football, play it, see it again and again. Women are basically phobic; men are basically counterphobic...
Robert Seidenberg of Syracuse is one analyst who has bought the feminist argument. Says he: "We are confronted with the paradox that women are declared phobic when they exhibit anxiety in public places where custom, until yesterday, had prohibited them from entering. If one replaces the idea that the woman had the desire to sleep with father with the thought that she wanted to work with him in his downtown office, more salutary results might be obtained...
...Cheers for Clare Boothe Luce [April 8], the widow of TIME'S founder, for speaking out against TIME'S egregious posturing and phobic Watergate reporting...