Fear of Touching a Doorknob
Doorknob Phobia
Fear of touching a doorknob is filed in the reference literature as a contamination fear, and the object is chosen for its position rather than for anything about the object. It also records a second reading in which the handle is not the problem at all.
Why the doorknob and not the door
The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias, drawing on Robert Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary of 1981, explains the avoidance in one line: the person may believe the knob is dirty, or that it has germs on it. The fear is filed as a possible fear of contamination rather than as a fear of an object.
The choice of object is what makes it worth a heading. A doorknob is the one surface in an occupied building that cannot be routed around. A person avoiding handrails takes the middle of the staircase and a person avoiding public seating stands, and both accommodations are invisible. Every door has a handle and every handle has been held by whoever came through last, which makes the doorknob the point at which a contamination fear stops being private.
What the other reading proposes
The entry then offers an alternative that has nothing to do with dirt. An individual may fear something that could be on the other side of the door:
On that account the knob is not the object but the last step before it, and the avoidance is anticipatory. Two entirely different mechanisms produce the same behaviour, a hand that will not close on a handle, and the reference work sets them side by side without deciding.
What the anthropology adds
From the psychoanalytic point of view, the entry says, the person avoiding doorknobs is protecting himself against an anal-erotic wish to be dirty or to soil. That is the standard mid-century move and it converts an avoidance into its own opposite.
The sentence that follows it is stranger and better. In magic, the entry notes, the characteristics of an object are communicated by touching it. That is contagious magic, the principle that contact transfers properties and the transfer survives separation, and it is the clearest available description of what a contamination fear actually assumes. A reference book on phobias reaching for anthropology in its last line is unusual, and the anthropology is the more useful of its two explanations.
What the doorknob entry lacks
No Greek compound was ever coined for this fear, which is itself informative in a vocabulary that has one for the fear of flutes. It has no prevalence figure, no case report and no diagnostic listing. A presentation of this kind would be assessed and treated as obsessive-compulsive disorder or as a contamination phobia, and the doorknob would appear in the notes as a detail rather than as a diagnosis.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Touching a Doorknob
- Fear of GermsMysophobia is where this would be filed, and the doorknob is its most characteristic object because it is the one surface in a building that cannot be avoided.
- Fear of Being TouchedBoth are fears about what contact transfers, and the reference entry's closing note on contagious magic describes the assumption they share.
- AgoraphobiaThe second reading in the reference entry, a fear of what may be on the other side of the door, is a fear of the room beyond rather than of the handle, and a crowd is the first example it gives.
Common questions
Questions about Doorknob Phobia
- Why a doorknob specifically?
- Because it cannot be avoided. Someone avoiding handrails walks in the middle of the stairs and someone avoiding public seats stands, and neither accommodation is visible. Every door has a handle, every handle has just been held by someone else, and that is where a contamination fear becomes a problem other people notice.
- Is it always about germs?
- No. The reference entry gives a second mechanism outright: the person may fear what is on the other side of the door, and names a crowd, darkness or a feared object. The behaviour looks identical and the fear is of the room rather than of the handle.
- What does magic have to do with it?
- The entry's closing line notes that in magic the characteristics of an object are communicated by touching it. That is contagious magic, the principle that contact transfers properties and that the transfer persists after separation, and it describes the assumption inside a contamination fear more exactly than the psychoanalytic reading the same entry offers.
- Why has it no Greek name?
- A fair question in a vocabulary that coined one for the fear of flutes. The absence suits a fear that is not really about its object.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of GermsWilliam A. Hammond made the word in 1879 describing an OCD case of repeated hand-washing. It now names a specific phobia, which are treated differently.
- Fear of Being TouchedThe clinical record offers a definition and a list of symptoms. The only accounts of where the fear comes from are in fiction, and they say abuse, consistently.
- AgoraphobiaWestphal coined it in 1871 from agora, the marketplace. The situations it covers include queues, cinemas and being at home alone. What unites them is escape.
- 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.
- Fear of ClocksThe clean form is chronometrophobia. The spelling everybody uses has an extra letter and a Latin etymology invented to justify it, which does not work.