Fear of Monsters

What the reference work says about teratophobia

Ronald Doctor, Ada Kahn and Christine Adamec define teratophobia in the 2008 third edition of their encyclopedia of phobias as fear of deformed people or of bearing a monster, and cross-reference it to two entries of its own components. They add two sentences about who has it. Some women develop the fear while pregnant. Others fear becoming pregnant because of it.

That second sentence is the reason the term is worth a page. Most specific phobias cost their owner an activity: a flight not taken, a lift not entered. This one, in the form the encyclopedia records, can cost a person a child, and it does so on the strength of a fear about what the child might turn out to be rather than about anything that has happened.

Why the monster under the bed is different

The fear of monsters that the lists mean is studied, and it is not studied as a phobia. Susan Marakovitz, Robert Wagmiller, Nicholas Mian, Margaret Briggs-Gowan and Alice Carter surveyed 1,202 mothers of two- and three-year-olds for a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology in 2011, and their opening line puts fear of monsters under the bed alongside sadness at a lost toy as feelings that are usually normative and transient, resolved by the child's own developing self-regulation or by a parent.

Their subject was the minority of cases where it is not that. What they found associated with anxiety and depression problems in children this young:

• child temperament
• maternal affective symptoms
• family expressiveness
• exposure to violence, which was associated with anxiety alone Where maternal affective symptoms were high, inhibited girls were rated as more anxious and inhibited boys were not.

Nothing in that paper uses the word teratophobia. A child's fear of monsters is an age, and the terminology that would make it a disorder is not applied to it.

What the Greek teras originally meant

The Greek teras named a sign sent by the gods, an event read as a warning, and only afterwards the malformed creature that might constitute one. Teratology carries the older sense into current medicine as the study of developmental abnormality, which is why a teratogen is a substance that causes birth defects rather than one that produces monsters. The encyclopedia's definition sits closer to that root than the list sites' does.

Why the phobia lists copy each other

Wikipedia's list of phobias says so directly: many such lists circulate with words collected indiscriminately from sources that copy one another, and a number of sites generate a page for any phobia name by dropping it into a standard template, a practice it names as content spamming aimed at search engines. The example it gives of where that ends is a page offering to cure prostitute phobia.

The complaint is not new. The American Journal of Psychology printed one in the year 1897 about the absurd tendency to give Greek names to objects feared, and offered klopsophobia, fear of thieves, as a specimen of where the habit leads. Teratophobia is older and better attested than that, and it still arrives at a reader attached to the wrong definition most of the time.

What is missing from the accounts

Neither definition has a rate attached. No survey has asked how many people fear deformed people, and none has asked how many avoid pregnancy for the reason the encyclopedia gives, which would be the more useful of the two figures because it names a consequence. The 2008 entry runs to four sentences and the 2011 paper never uses the word, so the term sits between a reference work that describes it without measuring it and a literature that measures the neighbouring thing without naming it.