The Tree Of Fear. Fear As A Stimulus For Development

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In psychology, there are several versions of the development of fears and anxieties. Anatoly Ulyanov, in his book "Children's Fears", summarizing the experience of such researchers of the psyche as Rene Spitz, Melanie Klein, Margaret Muller, Donald Woods Winnicott, Anna Freud and Sigmund Freud, briefly lists the fears inherent in a particular age of the child, speaking about studies showing the presence of a whole spectrum of innate fears. He writes about that. that even babies one day old show fear of sudden noise and glare. Other fears arise at the age of 6-8 months: fear of depth or strangers. In the region of the year, each child develops a fear of separation, which gradually dissipates as he becomes aware of parental love. Over time, the child learns to trust her, even if the parents are not around (Children's fears. Secrets of education: a set of tools for overcoming fears.-2nd ed., - M: Scientific Fund "Institute for Advanced Study", 2011.-120 p.)

At the age of two or three years, fears associated with the accustoming to cleanliness, for example, are frequent. Fear of disappearance: after all, like water disappearing in the toilet, a child can also disappear. The fear of being abandoned peaks at around two years of age. Having firmly attached to the family, the baby feels his dependence on his parents and is very afraid of their departure. Over and over again, he trains himself to move a little further away from them. At about two and a half years, the fear of the dark begins. The darkness itself is not terrible, but in the darkness what was known and familiar to the child disappears.

As the child grows and becomes familiar with the environment, the spectrum of his fears expands, but at the same time the ability to cope with them increases.

In kindergarten, the frequency of fears reaches its maximum. Fears associated with physical integrity of the body and with animals appear, and fear of the dark is becoming common. In addition, as the boundaries between fantasy and reality are still blurred, aggressiveness increases and fears of monsters and witches intensify.

At school age (six years onwards), fears related to body safety decrease. But new fears develop, due to life situations in which the child falls. Most often during this period, he is afraid of being rejected by the environment, failing and becoming the object of ridicule of teachers and comrades.

A fear of death also develops around the age of six. The child realizes that time flows in one direction … In adolescence, there are fears of illness and infection, fear of internal dangers (various impulses and impulses, including sexual ones), as well as fear of theft and burglary associated with the fear of the dark. Girls sometimes have a fear of being kidnapped. In addition, fear of social rejection and fear of an unknown future, that is, of possible failures in life.

- International studies have shown that these fears arise at similar ages in children of all cultures.

- Overcoming fears indicates growth and qualitative changes in the level of development of the child.

- According to this approach, innate interpersonal differences lead to more or less bias in fear.

On the other hand, some psychological schools believe that the environment plays a decisive role in the formation of children's fears. According to them, the child learns what to be afraid of, according to the reaction of adults to events happening to him and around him. In addition, some fears are acquired on the basis of their own experience: for example, a child bitten by a dog is predisposed to be afraid of dogs. In such cases, the younger the child is, the stronger and more lasting fear causes the key incident in him.

In the past decade, most psychologists have taken an integrated approach that combines different concepts. But, at the same time, not a single concept made a selection of fears depending on the innate mental properties of a person, given to him by nature but not provided by it, as well as a given potential for his development and realization. These properties lead a person to a certain predisposition to certain fears, including the determining factor in this is precisely the degree of development of his personality.

Each person is born with a certain set of mental properties that determine his future destiny, give him a certain direction of development and realization, shape his character, worldview, value system, needs, abilities, desires and even fears.

Thus, to varying degrees and for various reasons, fear can be experienced by all without exception; only for each person, or rather for a certain set of people, it will be, as it were, root. At the same time, we make judgments about a person, depending on how he manifests himself through action, and not in connection with what he thinks about himself. And the one who manages to cope with his fear - shows us that he is courageous, and we perceive it as such, but the one who cannot cope with fear …

For example, the owner of systemic thinking (analytical mind) in a realized state is a person of the highest quality, striving to achieve perfection in everything. Therefore, nature endowed him with such properties as a very good memory, a constant desire to learn, will, perseverance, attentiveness, thoroughness, understanding that the devil is in the details, etc. If such a person realizes his innate potential, then everything that he undertakes, he brings to the end, in connection with which, sometimes he faces the problem of perfectionism.

This type of people is characterized by the fear of embarrassment, and often they are not allowed to live, being tied to the house with intestinal problems, fears of changes and changes (that is, everything new), and fears of making a mistake interfere with development.

Such people often become hostages of a bad first experience, in which they preserve themselves for life, fearing repetitions, or rather the experience of the pain associated with it. "All the men are good …, all the women …", or "if I haven't passed this exam, then I won't pass the others …". In this connection, people significantly limit their abilities for realization, for getting pleasure and joy from life, getting stuck more and more, in a constantly narrowing ring of frustrations, taking by the throat of fear.

The fear of being poisoned is inherent in a person with an intuitive non-verbal mind, which relies on the unconscious, that is, has a fairly rare set of natural properties, in connection with which, such people manifest themselves more than specifically.

The fear of going insane is common to many psychiatrists with abstract intelligence. Often it is this fear that unconsciously pushes people into this profession, that is, into the sphere in which they can best realize themselves, cognizing others, concentrating on them, studying the psyche, revealing their souls, including their own. This fear is also innate and determines the direction of further development in the future, as a program inherent in a person by nature itself.

The native fear of a person with logical thinking is to get infected with something through the skin, as well as the fear of material loss. Moreover, such people, stressing, that is, losing the feeling of safety and security at the thought of tomorrow, begin to create "nests" for the future. Often due to the fact that they do not realize their properties and do not adapt well to stress, they suffer from skin diseases. With delays in psychosexual development, the problematic place is the unconscious orientation towards failure.

As Sigmund Freud noted, the list of fears and phobias "resembles the listing of ten Egyptian executions, although the number of phobias in it is much greater", while all of them can be reduced to one denominator - the fear of death. All other fears and phobias are derived from it, although they can take on a wide variety of forms - from fear of spiders to social phobia.

The strongest fears are experienced by those with emotional-figurative intelligence. It is these people, with a rich emotional world, living with feelings, who most of all suffer from fears and phobias, which they unconsciously enjoy in fluctuations in the amplitude of emotional outbursts. Even Anna Freud, in her research, wrote that children suffering from phobias flee from the object of their fear, but at the same time fall under its charm and are irresistibly drawn to it. (Freud A Op.cit. (1977) p.87-88).

But feelings are not given to us in order to suffer … Not hatred, but fear is the absolute opposite of love. And in which direction the impressionable person will swing, what will fill his quivering soul - depends only on how developed he is sensually and emotionally. That is, to what extent such a person realizes his natural potential in order to enjoy life through his sensuality.

The meaning of any person's life is much larger than his own life. The meaning of life for people with emotional-figurative intelligence is love. If he does not realize it, then he lives in fears and worries for himself; focused on himself, on his feelings. As a result, a person with a powerful intellect, with a gigantic sensory potential, finds himself on the sidelines of life. Moreover, as you know, any development occurs in the opposite direction. But in order to feel love instead of fear, you need to bring your feelings out of worries and fears for yourself - into empathy with other people. The scourge of our modernity - social phobia, arises precisely in those people who are strongly focused on themselves, on their feelings.

No development happens without pain

The biological theory of phobias suggests that phobias - such as fear of spiders, snakes, or heights - are a relic of our evolutionary past, stemming from the real dangers our ancestors faced, including the fear of being eaten by predators.

The fear of the destruction of the ego, or the cessation of the existence of the individual, for all of us is a situation of the emergence of a primitive fear, which is formed, inter alia, on the basis of frustrations. With frustrations, an increase in instinctive tension, without the possibility of discharge, causes a feeling of displeasure, while discharge, which reduces the accumulation of instinctive tension, restores balance or homeostasis.

The psychoanalytic theory, based on the research of Sigmund Freud, says that phobia is not just a fear of an external object or situation from which one can escape without noticing them, but a response to the threat that exists in the psyche - when the source of fear is inside the individual. Moreover, in his opinion, it is useful to consider phobias as answers to the requests of a person's inner world.

Freud believed that the alleged causation was just an illusion. Incentives and responses are not critical. Speaking about the relationship between stimulus and response, Freud has in mind the significant influence of unconscious factors on the mental life of a person.

The classical psychological concept of fear is this: fear is a signal or warning that something really terrible is about to happen, so something must be done as soon as possible in order to physically or mentally survive.

Freud's concept of fear was constantly changing throughout his life.

At the first stage, he believed that fear is not directly related to ideas or thoughts, but is the result of the accumulation of sexual energy or libido, as a result of abstinence or during unrealized sexual experience. Unrealized libido becomes a curse and turns into fear.

Freud's next theory of fear was about suppression (repression). Unacceptable sexual desires (impulses) arising from the primitive id (it) come into conflict with the social norms assimilated by man in the form of ego or superego. The stimulus for repression is fear in the ego, caused by the conflict between sexual instincts and social norms.

At a later stage in his thinking, Freud differentiated two main types of fear. Automatic and alarm. Automatic - a more primitive, primary fear, he attributed to the traumatic experience of total destruction, which could lead to death, resulting in greater tension. Signal fear, according to Freud, is not a direct conflict instinctive tension, but is a signal of the expected instinctive tension arising in the ego.

Freud considers both forms of fear, signaling automatic, as derivatives of the infant's mental helplessness, which is a companion of biological helplessness. The fear signal function is designed to stimulate the individual to take protective precautions so that the primary fear never arises.

It is important to note that Freud's definition of fear is based on the fact of life that the child is a helpless creature that is highly dependent on its parents for survival for a much longer period than any other species of the animal kingdom. Parents reduce the internal tension of the individual resulting from hunger, thirst, danger of cold, etc. (frustration) - this feeling of helplessness clearly manifests itself in various traumatic situations. Freud defined the fear of losing the object of love as one of the most essential fears.

Classical theory of phobia formation

Talking about common childhood phobias, Anna Freud dwells in detail on the story of a little girl who was afraid of lions.

“The girl was affected by her father’s words that the lions would not get to her bedroom. Saying this, the father, of course, meant real lions who could not do it, but her lions were quite capable of it … . (Freud Anna Fears, anxieties and phobic phenomena // Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 32. New heaven: Yale University Press, 1977. P 88)

In the book Interpretation of Dreams, S. Freud explains dreams about wild animals (which are one of the most common forms of childhood phobia) as follows: Dream work usually transforms fearful affective impulses of a person, his own or belonging to other people, into wild animals … (Freud S The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) // Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. P.410)

So, according to Freud, there are three different sources for constructing the object of phobias:

First, the splitting of the denied parts of the child's “I”: I hate dad, I love dad”; secondly, the projection of “repressed affective impulses”: “I don’t want to offend dad, dad wants to offend me”; and, thirdly, the displacement of the true object of the phobia: "It is not the father who wants to attack me, but the horse, dog, tiger."

Z. Freud - “You don't have to go far to find cases when a fearsome father appears in the form of a chimerical monster, a dog or a wild horse: a form of representation reminiscent of totemism. (Freud S)

Thus, the objects of phobias, both of an individual and of social groups, are created with the help of such mental mechanisms as splitting, projection and displacement. As a result, other people or entire communities become the embodiment of unacceptable aspects of their own personality, which can manifest themselves as phobic objects.

In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud describes the ways in which images of evil demons emerge in primitive communities. Experiencing ambivalent feelings for a deceased tribal leader, or an elder, leads to inner conflict and splitting between feelings of love and hate. Subsequently, the hostile part of the attitude (which is unconscious) is projected onto the dead man - “They are no longer happy that they got rid of the dead man. Well, although it sounds strange, he becomes an evil demon who is willing to gloat over their failures or kill them.” （Freud S / Totem and Taboo (1913） // Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol.13 P.63)

The instability of the father's position is a very eloquent symbol, but the instability of the mother's position, that is, her inability to perform her function … is very scary. Mother, this is the world in which you exist. And if there is no breast that feeds us, then the whole world is destroyed. Thus, the feeling of psychological safety is not as stable as we would like it to be. “We are worried about what is happening inside us,” says Freud. Infantile painful anxiety, from which most people can never completely free themselves, is a prerequisite for the occurrence of phobias. (Freud S. The Uncanny (1919a) // Standard Edition of the Complete Psyhological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol.17. P.252). Imagine the emotion that grips a child when the stable world around him is about to collapse.

Just like Freud, Klein believed that within each of us there is an inner game between what we call the life instinct or love, and the death instinct or hate, which leads to duality and the individual.

The world for the embryo is the inner part of the mother's body, and, from the point of view of the baby, only this world exists. Klein suggested that the child clearly show curiosity about this world, the mother's body appears to them in the form of an unconscious fantasy as a house of treasures of everything that you can get only while there. （Klein M. A contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition // Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works. Writing of Melanie Klein. Vol. 2 (1931) London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis). But the mother's body, which is our first home and source of security, can also become a repository of horrors, which later become the root of the fear of punishment. At the same time, subconscious recollection of intrauterine existence can create a feeling of "supernatural", since it is part of our previous experience. Some aspects of our previous existence are returning, trying to lure us into a desirable and dangerous place, full of horror, pleasure and exquisite torment.

Klein believed that when a child is upset, angry, or in anger, that is, frustrated, in his fantasies, he attacks the mother's body with whatever he has at his disposal. That is, he can bite using his jaws and cheekbones, and then his teeth. In this connection, the fear of punishment for fantasies about an attack on the mother, subsequently displaced to the unconscious level, can turn the whole body into a “repository of horrors”. Because if I want to attack you from the inside and turn all the contents inside out, then you may want to do the same to me.

Quite often, babies are afraid to take their mother's breast, arch their backs, screaming or turning away after they have been angry or disappointed that they had to wait a long time for the mother to arrive. The breast, which he has been waiting for a long time, may have been attacked in the mind of the infant, and now the child may fear that this breast is hostile towards him. Therefore, the baby is worried and afraid of a retaliatory attack on him from objects inside or outside him - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and tries his best to protect himself and his balance.

Thus, the obsessive situation of early fear is the cause of many of the fears that we all face. For example, a child's fear of a wolf with sharp teeth that can eat anyone is the fear of retribution for his own desire to eat an object.

Functions and mechanisms of fear (phobias)

Phobias function as part of the subject's mental structure. They give the impression of elements of the psyche taken out into the outside world, and not by chance.

Carrying out intrapsychic functions, phobias are a means of expressing hatred of aggressive feelings; at the same time they remove the problems of ambivalence, express anxiety in an understandable form and make it possible to control it, stabilize or legitimize the stormy work of fantasy.

We can even say that a certain progressive aspect is inherent in phobias, they contain a figurative representation of those phenomena that a person must overcome in order to become more mature. (Campbell Donald. Discovering, explaining and confronting the monster. Unpublished paper, 1995）

The avoidance observed in phobias suggests a direct connection with obsessive rituals. Freud viewed repetitive “withdrawal” from obsessive rituals as protection from “temptation” -that is, from staging unconscious fantasy and impulses leading to temptation. So, in his opinion, agoraphobia can be a defense against dangerous exhibitionistic fantasies, claustrophobia can be a defense against the desire to return to the mother's womb.

When the free expression of libidinal and aggressive desires becomes unacceptable and, moreover, the child begins to fear the consequences of his emotional manifestations - the phobia can behave like an impartial independent superego, regulating the child's chaotic and fragmented Oedipal impulse, threatening punishment.

The structure of phobias can also represent a way of ignoring unpleasant demands of the real world. In other words, the phobia does not allow reality to come too close, giving the individual the opportunity to grow up at a certain rate.

As for the interpersonal functions of phobias, they consist in the fact that the phobia maintains a positive image of the parental figure (a bad dire wolf and a good caring father), promotes idealization, and is also a regulator of the individual's “distancing” from the parental figure.

A phobia for a child can be a way of maintaining the status quo, while cognitive, emotional and libidinal development undergo significant restructuring. If the child is not able to achieve separation, while the early forms of idealization remain intact and intact, then the presence of a phobia may indicate a deep splitting of the psyche. (Masud M Kahan R. Role of phobic and conterphobic mechanisms and separation anxiety in schizoid character formation // International Journal of Psyhoanalysi)

Fear stimulating function

With the emotion of fear, the psyche signals to us that we are not fulfilling our specific role in society, we are not realizing ourselves, our natural abilities, which are assigned to each person, in accordance with innate properties. And if there are natural abilities, it means that there are needs, these abilities to realize. In this connection, in the absence of realization, the experience of frustration arises. It's like an artist, creating his paintings, seeks to get pleasure from the fact that other people admire his works, or suffers from the fact that his paintings do not arouse interest in people.

There is nothing else - just me and others. The greatest pleasure, as well as the most severe suffering - we get only when interacting with other people. In this connection, realizing ourselves in society, we get pleasure, and when we move away from people, we fall into destructive experiences, including falling into the trap of fears and self-doubt.

Irrational fear of death

The root of the tree of fear - the fear of death, has been living in our unconscious since the time of the first man. It grows through the feeling of inability to realize oneself in the midst of other people.

A child in the first seven years of life goes all the way of the evolutionary development of all mankind. The very first stage of a child's development, according to Z. Freud, is oral-cannibal. What can I say, a person was created in such a way in order to survive and, in spite of everything, preserve himself as a species, in connection with which, during times of severe famine, including during the war years, cases of cannibalism, which was the norm for human flock in archaic times. But who did the ancient flock eat first? Predatory animals, until now, during famine, eat the weakest. Likewise, primitive people - they ate someone who was for them a load of excess ballast, that is, did not have a species role (was useless for the development and survival of the flock), and therefore, in case of famine, served for the flock as food NZ. Thus, on the basis of frustrations with an unconscious feeling of social uselessness (in the absence of realization), through the thickness of mental defenses, vague anxiety into consciousness, nothing more than the ancient fear of being eaten or sacrificed breaks through.

Breaking established taboos necessary to preserve the species can also awaken ancient fear. Since if now for violation of the law, criminals are isolated from society, then earlier they were expelled from the pack for such behavior, and alone in the primitive community, or rather, outside of it, it was not possible to survive. Rejection by the pack is certain death. That is, possible rejection, devaluation, ridicule, causing social shame and social condemnation - in our psyche raises the experience of fear of death.

Similar experiences are experienced by a baby who, being absolutely helpless, is completely dependent on the mother, on her attention and on her love. He is not able to take care of himself, and therefore survive. Thus, rejection by the mother, the psyche of the child is equated with death. By the way, babies left in hospitals and maternity hospitals often die from reasons unexplained at the physiological level. Hospitalism is also a common syndrome of pathology of mental and physical development of children with a lack of emotion and attention, which in extreme cases leads to severe mental disorders, chronic infection, and sometimes death. Psychoanalyst Rene Spitz wrote about these phenomena in his studies of the development of the child's psyche. (Rene A. Spitz, The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations. 1965)

Fear as a way of survival

Fear or a feeling of self-doubt speaks precisely of frustrations - of unconscious unsatisfied needs for the realization of innate properties and programs of development or survival set by nature.

The force that attracts pleasure - libido, the force of life, the force of creation, the force of change and change, pulls us by receiving pleasure, and another force - death, mortido, the force of separation and destruction, the force of attraction of a static unchanging state - drives us away from potential suffering. Our eternal pursuit of pleasure and attempts to escape from suffering is the direct control of Nature, that is, the psyche. Suffering is a lack of pleasure, as bad is a lack of good, and darkness is a lack of light. Lack, dissatisfaction, frustration … Feeling the pressure of tension in emptiness, an unfilled desire that causes anxiety that can be defused only through an action aimed at satisfying this desire.

Thus, we have not gone so far from animals that do not have consciousness and are governed by an intraspecific coordinated instinct. We are governed by the same forces, only at a higher level, since, unlike animals, we can be aware of ourselves, our desires and our individuality and finitude. In this connection, if we experience unconscious dissatisfaction in our basic (innate) desires, which we do not even know about yet, or, worse, we also unconsciously “feel” that in the near or distant future we will not be able to fill ourselves (our desires) with pleasure, then fear will take possession of us.

A good example here is the feeling of hunger, which can serve as the most accurate analogy for the feeling of lack of fulfillment and the desire to get pleasure from writing, that is, from the realization of oneself, one's desires, and satisfaction of one's basic vital needs.

Conversely, when our desires are satisfied, we feel confident, and the fear goes away. Thus, our impulse to pleasure - and desire, as the material from which we are created in advance, is afraid to suffer damage through fear, taking care of ourselves, well, that is, about us. Therefore, fear is a positive quality. Having learned to understand and correctly apply which, we will find that it manifests itself in us not by chance and, often, directs us to the disclosure of the universal property of love …

In addition, psychologically it is extremely difficult for us to endure a state of uncertainty, that is, a lack of information (ignorance).

Fear of the unknown (anxiety) as a problem of perception is the most powerful source of our worries. When we manage to get the missing information, the level of fear is significantly reduced. As a rule, we are not afraid of what we are familiar with. Thus, the second trunk of the tree of fears grows through our perception of reality, again from the root of the fear of death, since it is behind the word “death” that there is only complete and fatal uncertainty. We know nothing about death … only a threatening emptiness, which each of us, during life, tries to fill in his own way.

Fear of the future is also associated with this phenomenon, and a modern person lives in a very unstable world, not knowing that we are preparing the coming day for him - therefore, people who are especially prone to fears often become easy prey for various psychics, magicians and fortune-tellers, in their ridiculous attempts, this is the future, to somehow predict for yourself.

Due to the fact that fear is a property of our survival, in fact, from the best intentions, including, wanting to protect our children, we constantly sow fear in them. Animals do the same with their cubs, which primarily teach how to survive correctly through fear, distinguishing danger, and, secondarily, how to get food for themselves.

By the way, we do the same, scaring our children with fairy tales about … cannibalism, in which someone ate someone (Little Red Riding Hood, Gingerbread Man, Three Little Pigs, etc.), awakening in them an archaic fear of being eaten, and then we are surprised: why does the child not sleep at night ?! And even better … in order to reliably consolidate the effect of scary tales for life, fixing the baby on fears, scaring the child that if he does not sleep, then a gray top (tiger, lion, leopard or other predator) will come and grab him by the barrel. As a result, over time, he will learn to receive the pleasure that Anna Freud spoke of, from his immense horror, watching him from the darkness of the depths of centuries of the unconscious. True, overflowing with fear, stopping to develop.

Fear as a factor in development

The British researcher of the child's psyche, and the founder of the Kleinian psychoanalytic school, Melanie Klein, was considered fear as the main motivation that stimulates the development of an individual, although excessive fear, if it gets out of control, can also have the opposite effect and lead to inhibition of development. Just like Freud Klein believed that inside each of us there is a kind of play between what we call the life instinct or love and the death instinct or hate, which determines the duality of the individual. "An uplifting experience with a mother generates impulses of love, at the same time that experiences of disappointment (frustration) generate anger and hatred."

Many young children feel that their growth is a way to get rid of their old characteristics and acquire a new one: I am already a big boy (girl). Bion writes that genuine learning to grow is a painful experience with many fears. A certain amount of frustration is an inevitable attribute of the learning process - frustration at not knowing something or worrying about being ignorant. Learning depends on the ability to endure these feelings. (Bion W. R. Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann, 1963. P. 42）

Bion, in his letters (Letters to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817), also describes a situation in which the infant, fearing that he is dying - that is, suffering from a primary fear of decay, projects this fear onto his mother.

A mentally balanced Mother can take on this fear and respond to it therapeutically, that is, so that the infant feels that his feeling of fear is returning to him, but in a form that he can tolerate. In this connection, the fear becomes manageable for the personality of the infant. (Bion W. R. A Theory of Thinking // Second Thoughts. Selected Papers on PsychoAnalysis (chapter 9) New York: Jason Aarons, 1962). The inability of a loved one to control an individual's fear can lead to the fact that fear, which has not been defined and localized, can return in an intensified form, nameless horror.

Moreover, when fear is defined, it becomes attached. The renowned neuropathologist Damasio proved that emotions help thinking. His research in this area shows that well-oriented and directed emotions are the support system without which the mechanism of reason cannot work properly. （Damasio A. The Feeling of What Happens. Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Heinemann, 1999. p42） This concept is similar to Bion's in that thinking arises only as a result of controlling emotional experience.

Thus, all fears lead to the realization of the potential inherent in us, and in this, in fact, lies the true reason for their existence. The more we are afraid, the more opportunities we have for development and self-realization, that is, for correcting our underdeveloped properties. As Sigmund Freud said - "The scale of your personality is determined by the magnitude of the problem that can drive you out of yourself."

If we were not afraid, we would neglect our future, would not care about survival, would not develop new technologies, would not strive to achieve something in life. Moreover, the goal of fear is to show us that we are not able to satisfy our desire on our own - to fill ourselves, but are primarily dependent on the mother, and then, on the world as on the mother, on other people. But, if initially, from the mother, we demand the satisfaction of our desires and take, then developing in opposition to the world, we already give up our talents, realizing ourselves only through the desire to satisfy the needs of other people.

The peak of pleasure for ourselves comes at the moment when we finally come to the cherished goal, after which this feeling weakens and quickly fades away. This is how our desire is arranged. In this connection, a person all his life, pursuing only his own interests, leads an endless pursuit of scanty happiness, which all the time eludes him. Since - "Who has achieved what he wants - he wants twice as much." As a result, a person receives more and more, and more material wealth, fame, power - but the feeling of pleasure always remains at the same phantasmagoric scanty level. Therefore, instead of being afraid for ourselves and suffering from this all our lives, Nature invites us to learn to fear for another.

Created by fear

As we have already said, despite the fact that fears live in each of us, depending on our properties, there are people who are most sensitive to fears, and therefore the most susceptible to them.

The innate properties of the psyche (determining intelligence, as well as the erogenous zone - that is, the zone most sensitive to the perception of the external world) is not just a collection of certain signs and character traits, it is a set of certain needs that require their fulfillment and implementation throughout life from birth and right up to the most advanced years.

The physiology of our body is arranged in a similar way, when a shortage, an underutilization at the mental level, triggers the processes by which the body tries to adapt, get rid of, or at least compensate for the suffering arising from these voids. In the article “A case from medical practice. Progressive myopia in a child”, written by Dmitry Kran, an example of this manifestation is developing myopia. As they say - fear has big eyes.

Sigmund Freud, in his works on the "hysterical personality", described the manifestation of a stressful possessor of emotional-figurative intelligence. Such a person is endowed with the widest range of feelings and experiences, and perceives any event a thousand times brighter than others. And again, the reason for this is the root emotion of fear, which, with the proper level of development and realization of the individual's mental properties, is transformed by him into compassion. That is, it is on the basis of the primary fear for oneself, when this feeling is brought out through concentration on the other, that an emotional connection is formed. An emotional connection is exactly what we call love. If this does not happen, then the person is possessed by phobias, which can manifest themselves in different ways - from "not love" for spiders to horror at communicating with other people.

A person who is not fully realized in his needs for filling a high emotional amplitude will unconsciously strive to realize his desires, at the expense of relationships with other people. But instead of an all-consuming and incredible love, to which he unconsciously strives, he will feel only fleeting short falls in love, trying to fill the depth and height of the volume of spiritual emptiness with the number of connections. In this case, all aspirations will be directed only to fill oneself, to receive feelings “in oneself” and for oneself. Such a person will hysterically demand from others - attention, compassion, empathy and self-love.

Instead of focusing on the feelings, emotions and inner state of other people, the person will focus on how they look on the outside, noticing the slightest changes in appearance. Due to the incredible need to draw attention to himself, in the transference, it will be extremely important for him how he looks himself - demonstrative appearance up to exhibitionism.

That is, the degree of emphasis on internal or external beauty in such a person will directly depend on the degree of his development. In a developed state, the desire to be naked will be expressed in sincerity, in which he exposes his soul, and in an underdeveloped state, in the direct exposure of his body.

A person who is unable to realize himself through love and compassion is filled with fears, throws tantrums, through which he receives an unconscious temporary release of the emotional tension accumulated in emptiness. At the same time, more and more often, to attract attention, which will be more and more lacking, using emotional blackmail, which can go up to a demonstrative suicide attempt. In fact, a person absolutely does not want to die, and moreover, he is terrified of death, but in this way he is trying to use you for the sake of the same drop of pleasure.

The talent for making an elephant out of a fly

At the same time, perceiving the main flow of information through the visual analyzer, a person with emotional-figurative intelligence has the highest ability to learn: since we all receive 80-90% of information through the eyes. So "to see a fly like an elephant" is inherent in its innate properties. In archaic times, precisely due to the fact that people who perceive the world around them through sight are the brightest, they were able to see in the savannah what others would never have been able to discern. What it meant to save my life. In this connection, to this day, their entire emotional amplitude fluctuates between two peak states, including due to the fact that during frustrations, from the backyards of genetic memory, an archetypal fear of feeling of an absolute inability to defend itself rises.

In a state of fear - such a person is afraid for himself and for his life, and in a state of love - directed from himself outside, he creates a prerequisite for development and for understanding the value of both his own and any other life.

Because of the persecuting fears for themselves and for others, it was these people who instilled in our society, such restrictors of the primary savage urges for sex and murder, as culture and humanism. It was they who limited our natural greed, which developed in us on the basis of the experience of frustrations and manifested itself in the fact that when we feel bad, that is, we feel a lack of pleasure, then, as in archaic times, by a barbaric raid or robbery, we can no longer simply to take away from the other all that causes in us a false feeling that only having what he has will I be happier.

This mental mechanism was described in her works by Melanie Klein, when a baby, being in symbiotic fusion with her mother, hallucinating during frustrations, in her fantasies (which in the first months of life is his reality) rob her, taking away everything that she is filled with, all that that brings him pleasure - milk and children.

Fear of the dark

One of the most powerful branches emanating from the trunk of the tree of fears is the fear of the dark. In the dark, nothing is visible, including the danger lurking in fantasies, which, through projections, fills it.

The emptiness of darkness is the most favorable place for a riot of played out fantasies associated both with Kleinian fixations on fears that have risen from the past, in connection with unconscious experiences of the present, and for awakening in it, chilling horror, the most ancient fear, through whose eyes, from the darkness behind a predatory and ferocious monster is watching us …

Thus, you should not frighten your impressionable children with scary bedtime stories, since fixation on fears can lead to delays in psychosexual development. It is through the overcoming of fear that such children develop in opposition.

The presence of a child at a funeral, which will leave in his soul a lot of repressed and suppressed experiences associated with death, can also fix on fear.

The child's love can be transferred from a state of fear to a state by involving him in reading classical literature, which develops an emotional-figurative intelligence, fosters sensuality, and tune in to compassion and empathy for the heroes of the book.

People who had a fixation on fear in childhood, already, as adults, like to scare themselves with horror films, to rock themselves with creepy stories and stories about the other world. And in a hysterical, that is, in an unrealized state, they are drawn to death and to everything connected with it. Thus, they create a kind of substitution for themselves - I am a source of fear for myself.

Such a person is easily put into hypnosis, lends itself well to suggestion. The other side of his hypnotizability is self-hypnosis. He creates images for himself and believes in them so much that for him they become reality.

I want to be a girl, as they are not eaten

Yuri Burlan, at his trainings in systemic vector psychology, says that it is in fears that the roots of transvestism, transsexualism, and some forms of homosexuality lie. To this social extreme, sophisticated, sensual and impressionable boys are driven by fear-based, archetypal behavior.

We often see handsome and slender young men fixated on themselves; in their appearance, seeking to attract attention, catchy clothes, extravagant jewelry, defiant behavior. And behind all this is emptiness. A complete inability to compassion, complete indifference to others, an absolute lack of understanding of either one's own desires or the feelings of another person. One all-consuming fear bursting from the subconscious.

The primitive fear of being eaten, manifested during stress (by the way, which still manifests itself in the psyche of an infant in the first months of his life), awakens an unconscious desire to hide through dressing up, in boys born so sweet and pretty, sensual, quivering, tender and absolutely unable to defend themselves.

This is due to the fact that in the ancient human flock during the famine, not girls, but precisely those deprived of physical strength, refined, gentle and incapable of killing, served for others as food NZ. But female mirrors to them, because of their specific role, much less often became victims of cannibalism.

Moreover, Yuri Burlan believes that it was the girls who smelled brightly with their feelings and desires most often found themselves under the patronage of the leader, who felt an increased attraction to them. In this connection, the boy, in order to survive, had no choice but to pretend to be a girl. Therefore, until now, with stress and frustration, such a boy feels an unconscious message to relieve himself of the overwhelming tension, creating a female image.

Moreover, when fear creeping out of the subconscious, all the voids of his quivering soul are filled … the gentle "cat" chooses a patron who can not only provide him, but also protect him. Thus, it is not homosexual attraction, but fear, that a sensitive and defenseless boy imposes such a life scenario.

Parents also play an important role in the development of this scenario. Since it is they, the whiny and tender boy is inspired that he is not a man. At the same time, forbidding the child to show his feelings, scolding for the fact that he “dissolves the nuns”, thus, not allowing him to take his emotions out, to pronounce them and direct them in the right direction. Prohibitions, punishments, humiliation do not allow a sensitive boy with an incredible amplitude of sensual natural potential to develop precisely in that sphere in which he is much stronger than everyone else. And a brilliant actor, an outstanding dancer or a famous musician could have grown up.

The pleasure of contemplating the beautiful and sensual is called the word "beautiful!" Further, everything depends on the degree of realization in a person's life of the potential given to him by nature.

Thus, not a single sensually developed personality can pass by what can be described by the word - beauty. Such a person, first of all, will admire works of art: combinations of color and light, sensually enjoy music and poetry. The less developed will be crippled by the glossy fashion and magazine beauty of provocatively dressed girls, languidly and defiantly looking from the covers. And the most realized person will admire what is beautiful in the soul of another person. He will develop himself in love for other people, calling him beauty, human qualities and feelings.

Thus, in order to get rid of fears and self-doubt, it is necessary to do two difficult things …

First, realize your nature, your desires and true aspirations. When a person realizes and understands himself, a mass of imposed false attitudes flies from him. Including, while there is no awareness of where the fear comes from, it cannot be eliminated.

Secondly, you need to switch your attention from yourself and from worrying about yourself to other people, concentrating on them - on their feelings, thoughts, desires. Man is a social being. And the greatest pleasure, as well as the greatest suffering, he receives only from other people. In this connection, focusing on other people relieves not only of fears, but also of any emotional disorders.