Fear of Fish

How Watson moved the bowl closer

The demonstration is John B. Watson's, and it is quoted in psychology textbooks far more often than the term itself is used. Watson begins by dismissing what does not work. A fearless four-year-old brother reaching into the bowl and catching the fish changes nothing. Shaming the frightened child changes nothing either.

What he sets out instead is a measurement. Seat the child to eat at one end of a table ten or twelve feet long, put the covered bowl at the far end, and uncover it as the food arrives. If that upsets the child, the table gets longer and the bowl goes further away, until a distance is found at which nothing happens.

The bowl comes nearer at each meal. In four or five days it reaches the tray. Then a small glass dish of water starts the same journey and arrives beside the milk three or four days later. Watson's claim for the result is flat and total: the old fear has been driven out by training, and the unconditioning is permanent.

What the passage describes is graduated exposure, decades before it carried that name, worked out by measuring the distance at which the child could still eat.

What radical exposure did instead

The same fear appears at the opposite extreme. A man with what was described as a life-affecting fish phobia was treated by radical exposure on the 2007 documentary series The Panic Room, and the outcome is reported as successful. One slow method and one fast one, both on the record for a fear with no research literature between them.

Why the Navajo were wrongly called phobic

The most consequential item under this word is a mistake. The Navajo were historically described as ichthyophobic on the basis of their avoidance of fish. That characterisation was later recognised for what it was, a cultural and mythic aversion to aquatic animals, and not a psychological condition of any kind.

The error is instructive beyond this entry. A clinical vocabulary applied to a group rather than to a person converts a practice into a pathology, and the suffix does the work invisibly. The catalogue carries a number of words built the same way, and this is the case where the correction is on the record.

What ichthyophobia covers

The term is stretched further than most. It reaches across four objects before arriving at anything a clinician would call a specific phobia:

• eating fish
• touching raw fish
• dead fish
• fish as animals, alive and present Those are four different objects sharing one word, and only the last of them is what the phobia vocabulary was built to describe.

Fear of eating fish has its own literature and a rational core. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published research on the fears of people concerned about contaminants accumulating in fish, mercury in particular, which is a fear of a documented exposure rather than of an animal.

Which animal galeophobia actually names

Wikipedia's article on fish fear reaches for selachophobia and galeophobia as the narrower terms for sharks, deriving galeos from the Greek for a small shark. The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias derives the same word from the same language and gets cats. This entry records the disagreement rather than resolving it, since neither reference is wrong about the Greek.