Fear of the Mind
Psychophobia
Psychophobia carries three separate meanings: discrimination against people with mental illness, an aversion to psychological considerations, and a person's resistance to knowing their own mind. Nothing connects the three except the word.
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Which names the prejudice carries
Sanism, saneism, mentalism and psychophobia all name the same thing: discrimination against and oppression of people on the basis of an actual or perceived mental disorder or cognitive impairment.
The population it covers is wide and named explicitly:
- people with learning disorders, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
- people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
- people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or personality disorders
- people with tics or intellectual disability
- autistic people, and anybody else experiencing cognitive impairment or neurodivergence
The harm runs from social inequality through insults and indignities to overt discrimination, with refusal of service and the denial of human rights given as examples. And the account is careful to say where it comes from: not only from the general public, but from mental health professionals, from the legal system and from other institutions.
That last clause is what separates this from the other prejudice terms in the catalogue. The profession that treats the condition is named among the sources of the discrimination against it.
Who coined the other names
Both of the commoner names have a person attached. Morton Birnbaum, a physician, lawyer and mental health advocate, coined sanism. Judi Chamberlin coined mentalism, in a chapter of the book Women Look at Psychiatry.
Their constructions differ in a way worth noticing. Mentalism is built from mental and sanism from sane, so one names the attribute of the person discriminated against and the other names the attribute claimed by the person discriminating. Psychophobia, built with the suffix, names an emotion neither of them was describing.
What the dictionary defines instead
Merriam-Webster defines psychophobia as an aversion to psychological considerations. Not to people, and not to mental illness: to the subject, which is the shape philosophobia has.
That is a third meaning, and it fits the term's use in psychoanalysis. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in May 2000 under the title A World of Psychophobia, Peter Wolson described it as so endemic to human nature that the process of psychoanalysis consists of a continual exploration of the patient's resistance to knowing what is dreaded in the unconscious mind.
On that reading psychophobia is not a fear of other people's minds but of one's own, and it is universal rather than pathological. The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias cross-references the word simply to fear of the mind, which is the only one of the three senses its filing supports.
Why the word carries every sense
The suffix does the work, as it does throughout this vocabulary. Psycho- means the mind, and a fear of the mind can be read as a fear of people who have unusual ones, a distaste for the discipline that studies them, or a reluctance to look inside one's own.
The three readings have different objects, different populations and no shared literature. What they have in common is a prefix that is too general to constrain anything, and a suffix that will accept whatever is put in front of it.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of the Mind
- XenophobiaBoth are prejudice terms in -phobia that an institution can hold, and this one names the professions and legal systems that deal with the population among the sources of the discrimination.
- Fear of PhilosophyMerriam-Webster's sense, an aversion to psychological considerations, is a distaste for a discipline rather than for people, which is what philosophobia names in the neighbouring subject.
- Fear of Fear ItselfThe psychoanalytic sense turns the object inward: a resistance to knowing what is dreaded in one's own unconscious, which is a fear of a fear rather than of anything outside the person.
Common questions
Questions about Psychophobia
- What does psychophobia mean?
- Three things, with nothing connecting them but the word. It is one of four names for discrimination against people with mental disorders; Merriam-Webster defines it as an aversion to psychological considerations; and in psychoanalytic use it means a person's resistance to knowing what is in their own unconscious.
- Who coined sanism and mentalism?
- Morton Birnbaum, a physician, lawyer and mental health advocate, coined sanism. Judi Chamberlin coined mentalism, in a chapter of the book Women Look at Psychiatry. The two constructions differ: mentalism names the attribute of the person discriminated against, sanism the attribute claimed by the person discriminating.
- Where does the discrimination come from?
- Not only from the general public. The account is explicit that it also comes from mental health professionals, from the legal system and from other institutions.
- What is the psychoanalytic sense?
- A resistance to one's own mind. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in May 2000, Peter Wolson called psychophobia so endemic to human nature that psychoanalysis consists of a continual exploration of the patient's resistance to knowing what is dreaded in the unconscious. On that reading it is universal rather than pathological.
Added 2026-08-24 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- XenophobiaThe encyclopedia of phobias gives it three words. The working definition is about group boundaries, and one sociologist counts admiration as the same act.
- Fear of PhilosophyThe Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1853 and records a frequency that fell twentyfold by the 1920s. The word peaked when it was coined.
- Fear of Fear ItselfWhat is feared is the sensation of fear, so the trigger travels with the person. Its treatment induces panic deliberately, with caffeine, carbon dioxide or adrenaline.
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Existential DreadMarcel coined existentialism and later abandoned it, Sartre rejected it before adopting it in 1945, and the nineteenth-century figures died before the word existed.