(Note: This article is selected from my series of courses "Psychoanalytic ** Neurosis").
a) About fear.
1) What is fear?
Fear is the fear in our hearts, the nervousness and helplessness of people in the face of internal and external threats. As an emotion, fear is a colloquial word, fear is a professional language, and the professional field will say "phobia" instead of "phobia".
As emotional feelings, they may differ in degree, and fear is experienced less than fear. For example, a person who is afraid of heat will say "I am afraid of summer" and not feel "I am afraid of summer"; When we are faced with a sudden crisis, we are naturally very frightened, and the word non-fear can express the level of fear at that time.
Psychology is concerned with the fear of psychological sensations, not the fear of being in crisis, but the externalization of unconscious deep fears.
Emotions similar to fear include anxiety, nervousness, worry, panic, etc., and there is no inevitable relationship between them that increases or transforms, but is only a description of people's risk premonition in different situations, reflecting people's fear in different moods.
Fear is a fundamental element of our emotional structure. The universe itself is full of bizarre, horror, and variables, and society is full of stress, risks, and variables, so for conscious human beings, fear or fear is everywhere from birth to death.
2) Types and categories of fear.
Krishnamurti said that no matter how carefully we analyze fear or create theories about it, we will eventually be afraid. But if we can dig deeper into it, we might be able to get rid of it completely.
The signifiers of fear, explicit and **, conscious and unconscious, broad and specific.
Unconscious fears of mental sub-division include: hypochondriacal fears, sexual fears, situational fears, intimacy fears, marital fears, fears of fear, and so on.
People in different situations have the same or different fears, and people in the same situations have the same or different fears. For example, couples are often afraid of emotional betrayal, parents are often afraid of their children's failure, and children are often afraid of separation and control; Farmers are afraid of natural disasters, and drivers are afraid of man-made disasters; The wise are afraid of mediocrity, and the mediocre are afraid of poverty; The leaders are afraid of usurping power, and the people are afraid of suffering. Wait a minute.
(b).Fear of the ** learn.
One of the difficulties of people with phobias is that they don't know why they are afraid of things they shouldn't be afraid of, and why they can't control their fear of not being as fearful as they should be. From the perspective of symptoms, the patient is indeed threatened by the object (object) of fear, such as severe insomnia, and from a psychoanalytic point of view, there are the following dynamic roots:
1) Fear experiences early in life.
The first 3 years of a person's life, including the fetal period, is the period when a primordial sense of security is established, during which there are too many experiences such as fear, fear, threat, etc., these experiences will be imprinted in sensory memory.
Traumatic experiences in childhood, such as bereavement, humiliation, abandonment, and unexpected danger, are also the deep roots of phobias.
2) Collective unconscious fear.
Fear is the most basic human emotion, the driving force that drives human evolution, and it stimulates and develops all human creative behaviors. At that time, mask group dance, totem taboo, totem worship, etc., were all early civilizations that people resisted fear, and they were the prototypes of the collective unconscious fear complex of human beings.
The birth of man is the first crisis that man experiences. Psychoanalysis sees this first crisis as the archetype of the various crises that will be encountered later in life's journey. There is an inexplicable fear of this first crisis.
This collective unconscious fear complex and the imprint of the archetypal experience of birth crisis in the depths of the human heart are also the deep roots of phobias.
3) Sensory inhibition and thinking limitations.
The thinking and behavior patterns of phobias are all thought and done to prevent psychological panic. Due to the inner restlessness of the phobia, it will exert extreme energy to calm the mind, which also suppresses the feeling of noticing and appreciating other aspects, resulting in a low sensory ability. This is the seesaw principle.
For example, there is an interpersonal phobia who is afraid that he will do something stupid to stab a colleague (this is compulsion, or obsessive-compulsive disorder). In order to control and avoid this danger, he tried not to look at people and not speak in interpersonal interactions, and then developed to not interact with people and see people fearfully. He said that he only had tension in his life, and he had never felt anything comfortable or happy. It's sad to feel like you're presence.
According to psychoanalysis, the inhibited mind begins in the early stages of mental life, because fear and the removal of fear plunders a large amount of libido (energy), and the energy used for other developmental needs is severely insufficient. Therefore, sensory and mental inhibition, as a secondary factor, has become an early cause of phobias.
4) The personality traits behind fear.
Although there are differences in the characteristics of various neuroses, there are many homogeneous characteristics, such as: irritability, sensitivity and suspicion, excessive truthfulness, forbearance, paranoia, indifference, etc., which are the basic characteristics of personality and exist in all kinds of neuroses.
In addition to being sensitive, suspicious, and cautious, phobias also have significant traits such as cowardice and avoidance, which "force" them to smell (of course, a mental fantasy, or the appearance of vulnerability itself) even when they are in a safe situation. In terms of behavioral style, they unconsciously put themselves in a mode of alertness and defensiveness.
(3) InsightThe path of fear.
Since fear is everywhere, so are the ways to recognize and deal with it. The physiological ability to hear, see, touch, smell and feel, intuition, thinking, and feeling is the basic way to understand fear. The recognition of neurotic fear is the conscious awareness of subconscious fear, which we can reach through special means.
1) Symbolic insight into fear.
Words and speech are the direct ways for us to understand fear, but they are often in vain, and the way to truthfully reflect the truth of fear is precisely that: our body, such as physique, disease state; our non-verbal expressions, attitudes, behaviors; Our unconscious behaviors, such as slips of the tongue, mistakes, dreams, daydreams, etc.
Symbolism is a metaphorical device used by humans to express their thoughts. In a psychoanalytic sense, symbolism is an elegant defense of man to protect or avoid the truth. The symptoms of neurosis are symbols and defenses, and the fear in the heart of the patient can be seen through the symptoms. Such as:
neurotic anorexia, symbolizing the fear of desire; Binge eating disorder, symbolizing the fear of nothingness. Their common symbolism is aggression, a kind of self-attack that follows fear and repression of aggression.
Hypochondriasis, symbolically expressing the fear of loss, such as fear of loss of self, loss of meaning or value, loss of life.
Agoraphobia, symbolically expresses the fear of losing control, the fear of abandonment, the exposure of privacy, and so on.
Cardiac phobia, symbolically expressing a certain conflict between desires and taboos.
Blushing and fearful symbolizes sexually related stigma repression.
Zoophobia, a symbolic expression of fear or disgust for a relational person. Different animals have different symbols.
Neurotic wheezing, or vomiting, symbolizing overwhelming stress, relationship control, etc.
The above symbolic insight into fear is intended to provide a multi-faceted reflection on the nature of things, and does not necessarily refer to a certain symptom, but to symbolize something.
2) Insight into fear through dreams.
There are unconscious fears hidden in people's psychological symptoms and dreams. Psychological symptoms can be understood through symbolic analysis, and the same is true of dreams.
For obvious fear dreams, it is easy for the average person or dreamer to understand what they are afraid of, but not necessarily why they are fearing. For example, a man in a marriage is often awakened by nightmares in which he is either chased or fallen off a cliff, but he usually lives a peaceful and happy life, so he cannot understand why he has a nightmare and what the nightmare means.
Nightmares are expressions of fear, even when they are not felt during the day. Fear dreams of people who are usually very happy express that the dreamer has a suppressed subconscious fear, but what exactly is feared, what does the fear come from, what does it portend, etc., should be answered with the dreamer.
For many strange and bizarre dreams, the dreamer may not have a sense of fear, but there is a deep fear hidden in the strange dream. For example, some people always dream that they are driving a bus to the top ......of a mountain, some people dream of losing teeth, they dream that their heads have a lot of wires, some people dream that their partner has become crazy, and they dream that they are assassinated by their first loveThese dreams all reveal the dreamer's deep fear of a certain pressure, a certain ability of oneself, and an emotional crisis.
What kind of unconscious danger does the fearful dream, whether overt or hidden, convey? It is necessary for the dreamer to interpret the dream under the premise of psychological analysis in order to gain insight into the truth of fear.