Comments on Phobic Mechanisms in Childhood

IN JULY 1976 A SYMPOSIUM WAS HELD IN LONDON BY THE INTERNATIONAL Association for Child Psychoanalysis, on the topic of "Fears and Phobias in Childhood." At that meeting two cases of the analysis of young children were presented.1 There was, in addition, a panel discussion on the subject, and the meeting ended with a summing up by Anna Freud (1977). It is the remarks she made then that I want to take as the starting point for this paper. In spite of the excellence of the presentations and discussions in 1976, I (as well as many others) did not feel substantially wiser in regard to phobias after the meeting than we had before it. Anna Freud herself indicated her disquiet by starting her final comments with a criticism of the title of the symposium. She suggested that a title "Fears, Anxieties, and Phobic Phenomena" would have been more appropriate than "Fears and Phobias." Psychoanalysis, she said, had always distinguished between fear and anxiety, fear relating to a person's attitude toward real dangers threatening from the outside and anxiety being a reaction to internal threats arising from, as she put it, "clashes between the drives and internal opposing forces." Fears do not develop into phobias, she said, but anxiety can do so. To ignore the distinction between fears and anxieties, and "to treat the effect of external and internal threats under one and the same terminological heading is not a step forward in our theoretical position, but rather implies the reverse" (p. 86).

Thus the alternative title she proposed, "Fears, Anxieties, and Phobic Phenomena," spanned "the whole range from reactions to deprivation, frustrations, losses, injuries, accidents, attacks, disasters which threaten safety from the outside to the reactions to conflicts, guilt