Fear of the Bathroom

How the fears sort themselves by age

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias, drawing on Robert Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary of 1981, sets out what people with this fear are afraid of, and the list falls into a sequence:

• falling into the toilet
• being attacked by a monster coming out of it
• being infected

Those belong to different people at different ages, and the entry notes that the fear is found in some children and in some adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A toddler for whom the toilet is genuinely large enough to fall into has a fear that is close to accurate. A child expecting something to come out of it has the ordinary imaginative fear of a dark opening in the floor. An adult worried about infection has a contamination fear with a location.

The entry adds a further group: those who fear using any toilet but their own, and those who fear being seen or heard while urinating or defecating. That is a social fear, and it is a fourth thing under the same heading.

Why nobody has measured this fear

Fears of urinating or defecating in unfamiliar bathrooms, the entry says, are often not disclosed, and are not even assessed by surveys, but from clinical reports may be extensive.

That is an unusually candid admission for a reference work: the condition is probably common, the evidence for that is what clinicians see rather than what anyone has measured, and the measurement has not been attempted because nobody asks. The two conditions that share this territory, paruresis and parcopresis, are in the same position, and one recent study of students found avoidance of public lavatories running at 14.4 per cent.

What the psychoanalytic reading added

The entry closes by noting that from the psychoanalytic viewpoint bathroom phobia may involve ideas of castration. That reading is recorded here because the reference literature carries it, and because it illustrates what the phobia vocabulary was built out of: a mid-century clinical world in which a child's fear of a hole in the floor was read as a fear about the body's integrity.

Why the dark corridor is the common version

The everyday form of this fear is not about the room at all but about getting to it. The catalogue of narrative conventions maintained at TV Tropes has a page for nighttime bathroom phobia, describing the child who needs the lavatory and will not cross a dark hallway to reach it, and the outcomes on either side of that decision. The page carries a note that it accepts no real-life examples because it is true of too many people, which is a backhanded way of recording how common it is.

That version is a fear of the dark with a destination attached, and it resolves with age in most people. The reference entry's other three do not necessarily.