Abstract & Existential · 28 entries
Abstract and Existential Fears
Failure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten. These are the fears with no physical object at all, and that absence is why the group carries the thinnest clinical record on the site. A fear can be studied when there is something to put in front of the person and measure the response to. A fear of time passing gives an experimenter nothing to show.
The consequence is legible in the labels. Not one term filed here is named in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11, and several exist as words and nothing else. Meanwhile the two entries in the group with real literatures behind them, impostor syndrome and Eco-Anxiety, are studied under names that never took the suffix at all, which is a useful thing to notice about how research and vocabulary come apart. The filing rule is strict: if there is a thing, a place, a creature or a sensation, it files there instead, and what is left is the fears with nothing to point at.
In this category
All 28 abstract and existential fears
28 entries
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Existential DreadMarcel coined existentialism and later abandoned it, Sartre rejected it before adopting it in 1945, and the nineteenth-century figures died before the word existed.
- Fear of ChangeCommensal rodents are thought to have evolved higher neophobia because humans kept inventing new ways to kill them. Two thirds of the food form is genetic.
- Fear of CrimeBetween a third and a half of people in England and Wales report worry about victimisation, and probing finds few worry about their own safety day to day.
- Fear of DreamsTwo brain-imaging studies suggest the frightening dream is part of an overnight regulatory process. The avoidance the fear produces removes the mechanism.
- Fear of EverythingHis definition has not been improved on in a century: anxiety that floats as in a dream and fixes on an object only for an instant before passing to another.
- Fear of FailureHigh scorers on the fear of negative evaluation scale think they are performing badly and are performing well. Low scorers overestimate their effectiveness.
- Fear of Fear ItselfWhat is feared is the sensation of fear, so the trigger travels with the person. Its treatment induces panic deliberately, with caffeine, carbon dioxide or adrenaline.
- Fear of GovernmentFour vocabularies cover the fear of the state and none of them is clinical, from politicophobia and anti-statism to measured political alienation.
- Fear of HappinessIf cultures differ in how much they fear happiness, happiness indices measure different things in different places. A six-country study found the differences are real.
- Fear of Home SurroundingsIn psychiatry it would mean fear of the bathtub and the light switches. In practice it means whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
- Fear of ImperfectionMaladaptive perfectionism has a name most people have not met, and a dated trend: rising among young people in higher education since the late 1980s.
- Fear of InfinityNo object can be brought into the room. What produces the panic is an intrusive thought, and one neuroscientist thinks the real subject is the future.
- Fear of Making DecisionsWalter Kaufmann coined it in 1973, and the argument comes from Kierkegaard: the freedom to make a decision that may change us is what breeds the anxiety.
- Fear of Missing OutThe 2004 article that named FOMO also named FOBO, fear of a better option. One is about what happens elsewhere, the other about the choice already in hand.
- Fear of NothingnessNo dictionary carries the word, while the thing it names was argued over from Parmenides to the barometer that produced a vacuum in 1643.
- Fear of PhilosophyThe Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1853 and records a frequency that fell twentyfold by the 1920s. The word peaked when it was coined.
- Fear of PleasureOne proposed origin is solidarity with the world's poorest countries, which turns enjoying anything at all into something that feels unearned.
- Fear of PornographyThe first recorded use of pornophobia, in 1968, called it a mental condition. Britain's Longford Report shows what the aversion did to the trade it opposed.
- Fear of ResponsibilityOne word covers both a fear of taking responsibility and a fear of neglecting it, while the measured effect in the area contains no fear.
- Fear of SinGreek had one word for missing a target, making a mistake and sinning, so the fear built on it means all three. The documented condition is called scrupulosity.
- Fear of SuccessThe fear of success is named after a prophet who fled his commission, and the Greek words nearby all turn out to mean fear of failure.
- Fear of the MindThree unrelated meanings share the word: discrimination against the mentally ill, a distaste for psychology, and resistance to knowing one's own mind.
- Fear of Time PassingDescribed in prison inmates and identified again in quarantine during the pandemic. Time is a poor object for a phobia until it is something being served.
- Fear of WorkWilliam Upson defined it as the art of laziness and a morbid fear of work in one breath. Its own source now cautions that people mistake occupational stress for it.
- Impostor SyndromeMcElwee and Yurak found the standard instruments measure general negative affect rather than the belief that defines the phenomenon. It is in neither DSM-5 nor ICD-11.
- Peter Pan SyndromeRecognised by neither the WHO nor the DSM, and its seven markers still come from Dan Kiley's books. Two of the seven are defined by the sex of the other person.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
- Animals & CreaturesThe largest group in the catalogue and the oldest.
Common questions
Questions about abstract and existential fears
What is existential dread?
The name given to anxiety about existence itself rather than about anything in it: mortality, meaning, freedom, the passing of time. It is filed here as a studied term with no diagnostic code, and the entry traces the word through the philosophers who used it before it reached psychology.
Is fear of failure a diagnosis?
Atychiphobia is studied and it is not a diagnosis. No manual names it, and the research that exists sits under performance anxiety, perfectionism and impostor phenomenon rather than under the phobia word. That gap between a popular term and the literature that actually covers it is the pattern of this whole group.
What is the fear of infinity called?
Apeirophobia. It has almost no case literature and it does have a first-person account: a 2016 Atlantic article by Bobby Azarian, which is where most of the accounts circulating online trace back to. The entry names the source rather than repeating the claim without one.
Why do abstract fears have so little research behind them?
Because there is nothing to present. A specific phobia is assessed by exposure to the feared object, and an experimenter cannot bring in the future, change or infinity. What gets studied instead is the measurable behaviour that accompanies the fear, which is why the literature clusters under names like perfectionism rather than under the phobia terms.