Fear of Flutes
Aulophobia
Aulophobia is a fear of seeing, handling or playing a flute or a similar wind instrument, and the only explanation the reference literature offers for it is psychoanalytic. There is no case, no figure and no second account.
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What the whole entry says
The encyclopedia of phobias, in its 2008 third edition, defines aulophobia as fear of seeing, handling or playing a flute or similar wind instrument, and cross-references it to the flute, to phallic symbols, to sexual fears and to symbolism. The explanation it gives is that to the psychoanalyst the flute may serve as a phallic symbol and the fear may therefore relate to sexual fears.
That is the entry. The reading is not offered as one possibility among several; it is the only one, and the cross-references all point back into the same interpretive tradition rather than at any evidence.
What the definition does establish is scope. The fear is recorded as covering three separate things, and as extending to similar wind instruments:
- seeing the instrument
- handling it
- playing it
Seeing and playing are different problems: one is an aversion to an object and the other is a performance fear, and nothing in the entry separates them.
Where the word appears in use
Rarely, and usually as an example of something else. The clearest citation is from Josie Hadley and Carol Staudacher's 1989 book on hypnosis, which uses it to make an argument about which fears need treating: a person can live easily with pteronophobia, aulophobia or batrachophobia, they write, since one simply stays away from feathers, flutes and frogs.
That is the standard case for ignoring the rare phobias, and it is worth setting beside what happened to one of the other two names in the same sentence. Pteronophobia was used as a throwaway example in 1989 and got its first published case report in 2022, describing a woman who had to abandon her degree. Whether aulophobia has a patient somewhere is not known, and the argument that it would not matter if it did has not aged well.
What the Greek word aulos meant
Wiktionary gives the derivation from the Ancient Greek aulos, which was the standard wind instrument of Greek music, played at symposia, at drama festivals and at funerals. The modern gloss translates it as flute and the reference entry follows suit.
A word for a fear of a specific instrument is a strange thing for anyone to need, and the shape of the name suggests where it came from: a Greek root available for compounding rather than a patient anybody met.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Flutes
- Stage FrightThe definition includes playing the instrument, which for anyone who plays is a performance fear rather than an aversion to an object, and the entry does not separate the two.
- Fear of SoundPhonophobia takes the sound as its object and has a literature. Aulophobia is recorded as attaching to the sight and the handling of the instrument as well, which puts the object in the room rather than in the air.
- Fear of FeathersThe two names appear in the same 1989 sentence as examples of fears nobody needs to treat. One of them has since acquired a published case describing a woman who changed her degree.
Common questions
Questions about Aulophobia
- What explanation is offered for it?
- One, and it is psychoanalytic. The 2008 encyclopedia says that to the analyst the flute may serve as a phallic symbol and that the fear may therefore relate to sexual fears. No alternative is given, and every cross-reference in the entry points back into the same interpretive tradition rather than at evidence.
- Is it a fear of the object or of playing it?
- The definition covers seeing, handling and playing, and does not distinguish them. Those are different problems: an aversion to the sight of an instrument and an inability to perform on it belong in different parts of this catalogue, and the entry holds them under one name.
- Has anyone been described with it?
- No case has been published. The clearest recorded use of the word is in a 1989 book on hypnosis, which gives it as an example of a fear one can live with by simply staying away from flutes. The same sentence uses pteronophobia the same way, and that term acquired a disabling published case in 2022.
- What was an aulos?
- The standard wind instrument of Greek public life, played at drinking parties, at drama festivals and at funerals. Dictionaries gloss it as a flute, and the phobia entry inherited that translation along with the root.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Stage FrightIt can start thirty-six hours before the performance. Propranolol takes away the shaking and the racing heart and leaves the nervousness exactly where it was.
- Fear of SoundThe name says loud; the reported sounds are a door closing and something in the kitchen. The line between it and hyperacusis decides what treatment is safe.
- Fear of FeathersWiktionary failed the word for want of citations in 2010, and a Nigerian psychiatry journal published the first case report under the name in 2022.
- Fear of MusicThe only Wikipedia article under the name is a rock album, and the band's redefinition of the word is the most considered account of it that exists.
- Fear of BooksThe clergy and the beadles held the legal and religious documents, and used them on people who could not read. Bibliomania is a hundred years older.
- Fear of ButtonsOne source puts it under one per cent of the United States, another at one in 75,000: three million people against four thousand, and nobody has checked.