Phobias in Children

Freud saw the experience of anxiety as part of the normal living of every human being. Its origin, he thought, lay in the fear of the infant lest he be deserted in his helplessness and immaturity without the protecting presence of his mother. In the course of maturing, the human being learns active ways of avoiding or minimizing his anxiety. If he fails to do this, but remains in the infantile state of passive helplessness, he becomes, according to Freud, neurotic.

To Freud's concept1 of infantile anxiety as a danger faced alone without adequate protection from the parents, Melanie Klein2 has added the concept that the danger which causes anxiety can also be some inner danger, such as the danger of one's own hostility and destructiveness, which in turn might cause the parents to desert or punish the child.

Following the lead of Harry Stack Sullivan on the interpersonal role which anxiety plays between people I have observed that anxiety can arise in children not merely when they are threatened by an outer danger of desertion or punishment or by an inner danger of hostility which might lead to punishment, but more so in response to the anxieties of their parents, which spell to them, “I am not approved of.” Mostly the anxieties of the mother are the ones to which the child responds with phobias merely because she is with the child so much more. Of course when the father is the parent from whom two-way feelings and anxieties come, he can also cause phobic reactions in the child. As there is virtually no published material on the relationship of phobic children to their parents, I would