Counterphobia

It is described as the less usual but not uncommon response, which is a useful qualification. This is not a rarity; it is the minority route through the same problem, and it is far less visible because it does not look like fear from outside.

Where the counterphobic attitude shows up

Daredevil activity is the obvious case, undertaken in a counterphobic spirit as a denial of the fears attached to it, heights among them, and described as sometimes only partially successful.

Acting out in general is given a counterphobic source, reflecting a false self overly concerned with compulsive doing in order to preserve a sense of power and control. Road collisions have been tied to a manic version of the attitude behind the wheel, which is where the strategy stops being a private arrangement.

Sex is named as a key area, and the material gives three versions of it:

• hypersexuality, in people frightened of the very things they take themselves to love
• an adolescent skipping past sex play into something that presents as full sexuality and is not
• an adult making sex matter more than it does, over a buried worry about the damage it can do

The material adds that this approach may be socially celebrated, in a view of sex as gymnastic performance or hygiene, fuelled by what Ken Wilber called an exuberant and fearless shallowness.

Codependency is placed as a subcategory, hiding a fear of attachment inside over-dependency.

How language works as a counterphobic object

Julia Kristeva held that language can be used by a developing child as a counterphobic object, protecting against anxiety and loss. Ego psychology adds the failure mode: through the ambiguities of language, the concrete meanings of words can break the counterphobic attitude down and return the child to fear.

A word used as a defence stops working when it turns out to mean what it says.

Why Anzieu read psychoanalysis as counterphobic

Didier Anzieu turned the concept on its author. Building psychoanalysis was, on his reading, a defence of exactly this kind: an intellectual apparatus trained permanently on the instinctive and emotional territory Freud was afraid of.

Wilhelm Fliess, on the same reading, was what Freud kept in front of him through the years of the self-analysis.

Whether or not those readings are right, they demonstrate the reach of the concept: applied consistently, it can describe the construction of an entire discipline as an avoidance strategy that looks like an approach.

Why dismantling the defence is only the start

Otto Fenichel's position on treatment was that dismantling a settled counterphobic defence gets a therapist to the start of the work and not to the end of it. Whatever the defence was built over still has to be examined afterwards.

That is the caution this entry exists for. The counterphobic attitude is doing work, and dismantling it without addressing what it was built over leaves the anxiety with nothing in front of it.

Fenichel also noted how these defences end without help. Trauma can collapse one, and what follows is described as very painful for the person it happens to and, in therapeutic terms, welcome. David Rapaport's contribution was about pace. Go carefully, and then more slowly than that.

Why audiences pay to be frightened

The appeal of horror films has been attributed to a counterphobic impulse, which explains an audience paying to be frightened better than any other account in this catalogue.

Many actors have a shy personality off camera, released counterphobically under performance conditions. The Batman comics and films build the origin story around Bruce Wayne's fear of bats, which is a counterphobic attitude worked into a costume.

The documentary Sick discusses the counterphobic attitude of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who sought to escape the chronic pain of his cystic fibrosis through extreme acts of masochism.