Kate Summerscale

In 2018 a hundred acrophobes were recruited by Oxford University for a randomised experiment. After they had filled out a questionnaire to measure their fear of heights, half were assigned to receive immersive virtual-reality therapy and half to a control group. At six thirty-minute sessions, over about two weeks, the virtual-reality group wore headsets that enabled them to undertake different activities while they navigated ascending floors of a
simulated ten-storey office block. They might rescue a cat from a tree on one floor, play a xylophone near the edge of the next floor, throw balls out of the window on another. In this way, they acquired memories of being secure while high up.

When they answered a questionnaire at the end of the trial, the virtual-reality group reported a reduction in acrophobic symptoms of almost 70 per cent, while the control group’s fear had reduced by less than 4 per cent. When they filled out the questionnaire again two weeks later, more than two-thirds of the people in the virtual-reality group fell below the trial’s fear-of-heights entry criteria: they were no longer acrophobic. ‘The treatment effects produced,’ concluded the study’s authors, ‘were at least as good as – and most likely better – than the best psychological intervention delivered face-to-face with a therapist.’

The fear of water has striking cultural variations. A paper in the Journal of Black Studies in 2011 reported that only a third of Black Americans were confident swimmers, compared to more than two-thirds of whites. In part, the authors argued, this stemmed from a perception of swimming as an expensive, ‘country club’ pursuit, itself a legacy of the racist early twentieth-century policy of banning Black citizens from municipal swimming pools.
Aquaphobia is a circular anxiety, which comes to justify itself: to a person who avoids water, water is genuinely dangerous. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2016 that Black children in the United States were six to ten times more likely to die by drowning than their white peers.

Paul Shepard, an ecologist and philosopher who suggested that spiders had become ‘unconscious proxies for something else … as though they were invented to remind us of something we want to forget, but cannot remember either’. They disturb us because they are found in ‘the cracks that are the zones of separation, or under things, the surfaces between places’. They make us uncomfortable because they are creatures of the in-between.

In the US in 2017, Paul Siegel and Joel Weinberger carried out a ‘very brief exposure’ treatment for arachnophobia, whereby images of tarantulas were flashed up before phobic individuals (for .033 seconds) and followed at once with neutral, ‘masking’ pictures of flowers. The experimental subjects were unaware of having seen spiders, and yet they afterwards reported less fear of the creatures and were able to get closer than before to a live tarantula in an aquarium. The effect held even after a year. The brain’s fear circuitry had been desensitised, even though the exposure was delivered unconsciously. When the same procedure was carried out with consciously registered spider images, the arachnophobes became distressed during the experiment, and showed no decrease in their spider-fear.

In 2015 two researchers at the University of Amsterdam tested another rapid cure for arachnophobia. Marieke Soeter and Merel Kindt exposed forty-five arachnophobes to a tarantula, for two minutes, and then gave half of the group a 40-milligram dose of propranolol, a beta-blocker that can be used to induce amnesia. They hoped that by activating and then erasing their subjects’ spider memories, they might also erase their fear of spiders. Their experiment drew on the neurologist Joseph LeDoux’s theory of memory reconsolidation, which proposed that memories retrieved via the amygdala are briefly malleable: a recollection could be altered or extinguished in the hours immediately after it is triggered.

The Dutch trial worked: the arachnophobes who had been given the amnesic drug were markedly less phobic than the control group, even a year later. A single, brief intervention, announced the researchers, had led to ‘a sudden, substantial and lasting loss of fear’. They described their revolutionary new treatment as ‘more like surgery than therapy’. They had not tempered arachnophobia, but excised it from the brain.

The Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla, who invented the alternating-current induction motor in the 1880s, was so obsessed with the number three that he would count his steps to ensure that they reached a figure divisible by three and would walk three times round a building before entering. When staying at a hotel (always in a room with a number that could be divided by three) he would demand eighteen fresh towels each day and eighteen napkins at the dining table.

vampires were reputed to be compulsive counters. If waylaid by a heap of poppy, mustard or millet seeds, according to East European legend, a vampire would be unable to resist stopping to
count them. In American folklore, witches were held to be similarly distractible: if you hung a sieve over your front door, a witch would become so absorbed in counting its holes that she would never get round to bringing her wickedness into your house.

brontophobia (from the Greek word bronte, or thunder) and noted that it was often accompanied by astrophobia (from astrape, or lightning). The phobia had a long history – at the rumble of thunder, both Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, and Caligula, the third, would scramble for cover under a bed or in a vault beneath the ground

In China, in the 1960s, Mao Zedong banned citizens from keeping the animals as pets on the grounds that dog ownership was bourgeois and decadent: it was not until 2020 that dogs were officially classified by the Chinese ministry of agriculture as ‘special companion animals’ rather than ‘livestock’.

though the Middlesex Hospital researchers claimed to have found little evidence of trauma in the cases that they studied, four of the ten patients had mentioned frightening episodes of bombing, one describing herself as ‘petrified’ by bombs. Most adult Londoners in the 1960s and 1970s would have remembered the Blitz of 1940 and the ‘doodlebug’ attacks on the city in 1944 and 1945, which between them killed more than 40,000 people. Perhaps the Middlesex researchers considered experiences of bombing too ordinary to be traumatic. But for some of these brontophobic women, as for Lubetkin’s European émigré, the boom of thunder might well have recalled moments at which explosions had ripped the air of a city, shaken the walls of homes, shattered windows, torn craters in the streets, and maimed or killed those taken unawares.

the original cause was the Black Death, or bubonic plague, which killed half of the people of Europe between 1347 and 1351 and left many survivors mired in despair: a few vented their panic and grief in dance. John Waller, taking up Hecker’s interpretation, argues that the dancing epidemics were mass psychogenic illnesses, generated by fear and spread by imitation. The most dramatic outbreaks followed periods of renewed hardship, he observes – the Rhine flooded in 1373 and 1374, submerging streets and homes, while Strasbourg in 1518 had undergone a decade of famine, sickness and savage cold. Kélina Gotman describes the epidemics as symptoms of social upheaval, surges of primitivity and excess. Wild dancers appear, she writes, ‘where
there is a fault line in civilisation, a rupture and an opening, out of which they seem to spill’.

Some have suggested that the frantic dancing along the Rhine was really an outbreak of delirious convulsions caused by ergot, a psychotropic mould that can form on damp rye – and that the flooding of the fields around the river had poisoned the people’s bread. But the sociologist Robert Bartholomew argues that the mania was more likely sparked by pilgrims from Hungary, Poland and Bohemia who danced as a form of worship, and were joined by locals in the towns through which they passed. He cites the French chronicler Jean d’Outremeuse, who wrote on 11 September 1374: ‘there came from the north to Liege … a company of persons who all danced continually. They were linked with clothes, and they jumped and leaped … They called loudly on St John the Baptist and fiercely clapped their hands.’

Bartholomew points out that in the Middle Ages a dance could be an act of expiation. In the summer of 1188 the royal clerk Gerald de Barri described a ritual at a church in Wales, in which men and women danced at the shrine of St Almedha, then danced ‘round the churchyard with song, suddenly falling to the ground as in a trance, then jumping up as in a frenzy’. As they danced, they acted out their misdemeanours, miming the way in which they had unlawfully driven a plough on a feast day, or cobbled a pair of shoes. They were then led back to the altar, where they were ‘suddenly awakened, and coming to themselves’. Their dissociated dancing was understood as a spiritual state, through which they touched on their transgressions and sought absolution.