Phobic anxiety tracks a perceived danger rather than a present threat

Evidence

Freud later reiterates that through “isolation” (which we have considered earlier), the substitutive object enables the avoidance of a conflict due to ambivalence. It is this avoidance of conflict that produces anxiety. “Symptoms,” writes Freud, “are created so as to avoid a danger-situation” (129), and there is, as we have seen, danger. “For the anxiety belonging to a phobia is conditional; it only emerges when the object of it is perceived-and rightly so since it is only then that the danger-situation is pres- ent” (125). The father is thus repeatedly acknowledged by Freud to be a dangerous enemy. This is why the protective mechanism of substitution becomes operative. Having produced a “father-substitute,” the subject goes on to choose another enemy-object-no longer, and yet still, the father-which becomes the enemy. “There is no need to be afraid of being castrated by a father who is not there,” Freud explains, repeating the claim he made in Totem and Taboo. The absent father is, of course, no less powerful, for “on the other hand, one cannot get rid of a father; he can appear whenever he chooses” (125-26). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 445

Categorization

• XREF: Freud’s conditional-anxiety model of the phobia mirrors accounts of how diffuse cultural enmity is triggered by perceived rather than actual presence of the enemy figure.