Appendix III: Problems of Terminology

Early in this volume it is remarked that in discussions of fear and anxiety problems of terminology abound. In Chapters 6, 12, 18, and 20 some of them are discussed. Here we consider some others.

During this century countless efforts have been made to clarify terminology, and a number of writers have proposed specific usages for words in common currency. No solution will satisfy everyone; or at least no solution will do so unless everyone shares a common theory. For as often as not the terms adopted are a reflection of theory.

First, it is vital to note that the words ‘fear’, ‘alarm’, ‘anxiety’, and others like them can be used legitimately only with reference to the state of an individual organism. In this work they are used only in their adjectival forms to refer to the way an organism may be appraising a situation, the way it may be behaving, or the way it may be feeling, all of which are closely linked. Conversely, it is never legitimate to refer to ‘a fear’ or ‘an anxiety’, as though each were a thing in its own right. The pitfalls into which it is easy to stumble when feelings are reified are discussed in Chapter 7 of the previous volume and in Chapter 20 of this one.

Unfortunately there is a very pronounced tendency not only in common parlance but in psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic literature to reify both fear and anxiety. Thus we find Jersild, whose empirical work is so valuable, not infrequently tabulating the number of fears a sample of children are reported to show—‘fear of three specifically named groups of animals, such as dogs, horses, cats, received a tally of three’ (Jersild 1943)—and expressing his results as percentages of the total fears counted. Fortunately, however, in others of his tables, his results are expressed as percentages of children who show fear in particular situations; those are the figures drawn upon in this volume.