Phobias channel uncontrollable death fears onto more controllable objects
Evidence
About a century ago, Freud proposed that phobias and obsessions serve to ward off some kind of imagined disaster, at the bottom of which lies death. We suspect Freud was on to something. Unbridled fear of death is overwhelming; death is always looming and always final. Better to be afraid of something sometimes than everything at all times. So for people suffering from various phobias and obsessions, death fears are channeled into terror of something more controllable, ranging alphabetically from amathophobia (fear of dust) to zemmiphobia (fear of the great mole rat). — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 697
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explains the mechanism by which terror management theory accounts for specific phobias as focalized death-anxiety.