A Note on Claustrophobia

Originally defeated enemies or criminals were slain, eaten or tortured. Only in a comparatively late phase of civilization were they imprisoned. This analogy shows that fear of confinement is a survival of and defense against primitive pregenital anxieties and sadism. The genital connotations of claustrophobia are well known. The child is afraid to be alone in a room for fear he may masturbate. The confined space represents the mother's body or vagina, etc. In the following, I should like to draw attention to pregenital factors. Several schizophrenic patients have had phantasies of the type described by Edgar Allan Poe in which the walls of a room, close in, the floor gives way and the occupant is hacked to pieces by swords. The prototype of this dark prison with movable walls, nooks and crannies and dangerous objects, is the mouth with its teeth which eventually gives way and swallows the victim for good.

In England, until a few hundred years ago, people who refused to plead guilty were pressed to death. This seems to be a sadistically distorted embrace. In patient's phantasies the fear of a dangerous embrace is often associated with being hugged and eventually eaten by a bear.

Another cause of claustrophobia is wetting. The child wants to escape from the place he has wetted, which has become dangerous and of which he is ashamed. If he cannot leave it, he gets into a panic. The reluctance of some children to go to bed has a claustrophobic element. They are afraid, among other things, of being in bed because they have wetted it or may wet it. A patient related a story of the Nazis locking Jews into crowded trains with no lavatory facilities. The compartments were chemically treated in such a way that the excretions turned into poison, killing the people in a most painful way.

A child of three was cured of the train-phobia by analyzing her fear of not being able to get out of the compartment to urinate and being hurt by the steam of the engine, as punishment for the wet