Читать книгу The Fear Paradox - Frank Faranda - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWhen Fear and Imagination First Met
“Fear is not the adrenaline rush. It’s that helpless feeling of being alone in the dark.”
—Travis Fahs
A patient named Ella came in one day and told me her radiologist had found something suspicious on a recent x-ray. The x-ray was ordered to try to understand the source of a mysterious pain she was experiencing in her lower back. Ella was clearly upset and worried. Her grandfather had died of lung cancer, and Ella had been a smoker for many years before she quit. The fear of cancer was very close to the surface for her.
My first feeling for Ella was concern. I cared a great deal for her, and as she spoke, I worried that maybe she did have cancer. A series of vague images began to fill my mind. I imagined us dealing with the pain and despair. A frightening future flashed before my eyes. I wondered what this would mean for her. What kind of a final chapter would this be? Ella had suffered a great deal in her life and had finally begun to find some peace.
As Ella told me what she was experiencing, I could see how frightened she was. I could also see her imagination, just like mine, kicking into high gear. She began to recount all the tiny symptoms and physical sensations that she imagined were evidence of a cancer she was now about to face—the fatigue, the moments of dizziness, the insomnia the night before, the lack of appetite, a tenderness in her abdomen, stiffness in her neck, shortness of breath. And even though there was no conclusive evidence, Ella just kept repeating, “It could be; I was a smoker; it could be cancer.” And of course, Ella was right. It could be.
Aristotle was perhaps one of the first to give voice to the phenomenon that had gripped Ella when he said, “Let fear, then, be a kind of pain or disturbance resulting from the imagination of impending danger, either destructive or painful.”36 The relationship of Fear to imagination that Aristotle was proposing brings front-and-center the question we arrived at in the last chapter related to perception. Fear, we discovered, is an emotional alarm that requires some form of activation. For the most part, this comes from sensory cues signaling danger. But now we are faced with another question. Can fear be triggered by imagination? And if so, as we saw with Ella, can we ever know for sure whether our fears are realistic?
Certainly our fears feel real, but are they? Our appraisal of what is scary is highly unique to each of us, regardless of how similar we may be. What I am afraid of is both similar to and different from each of you, no doubt. It is not a consideration of whether one perspective is more accurate or valuable than another; it is just to note that our individual fears are subjectively different. And even though there are a great many shared fears, our experience of those fears appears to be infused with something unique to each of us—what Aristotle was calling “imagination.” Threat assessment, then, is not the internalization of objective reality, but an amalgam of sensory experience and our personal, imaginative coloration.
The Boogeyman in the Closet
Infants and children seem to go through fairly predictable stages of fear. Moreover, research indicates that these stages are consistent across cultures.37 We can glean from this that innate fears appear to have offered us an evolutionary advantage. This fact is interesting enough, but even more fascinating is the possibility that these innate, cross-cultural fears still have relevance for us today.
Understanding the natural unfolding of fear throughout infancy and childhood dates back to 1897, when G. Stanley Hall, the first president of Clark University and one of the pioneers in child developmental research, conducted the first systematic study of children’s fears.38 What he saw then is quite similar to what we see today. At about eight months of age, and continuing until a child is approximately two or three years old, infants fear strangers, particularly men. This fear does not seem to be different when children are cared for communally or in familial isolation with their mother.
A second fear that emerges developmentally is fear of separation. This, not surprisingly, occurs as an infant begins to explore away from his or her mother, at around twelve months, and continues until about two or three years of age. This manifestation is easily recognized at bedtime, but it is also present on the playground, when a toddler begins to explore in ever-widening arcs away from his or her parent. At some point, they look back to make sure they can still see their parent, and most importantly, to make sure that their parent hasn’t abandoned them.
The third innate fear that young children all seem to pass through is the fear of monsters and demons. So many of my patients have memories of worrying about the Boogeyman. For some, the monster was under the bed and for others it was in the closet. But what is important to note about this developmental stage of fear, as distinct from the other two I mentioned, is that the object of dread is being conjured up in the imagination. This seems to correlate with the advent of more sophisticated cognitive capacity.
The innate nature of these fears tells us something important about what threats were present for us throughout the course of evolution. The very helplessness of the infant and child demanded proximity to the caregiver. Also evident is the apparent threat that infants faced from other humans outside the closest circle of family. Finally, as children grew older, they learned to be afraid of unseen predators: predators or monsters that they knew existed—in the closet, under the bed. It was evidently prudent for them to keep the possible existence of these predators in mind, even if they couldn’t actually see them.
Although most of these childhood fears seem to lessen by adolescence, there is one fear that remains with us long into adulthood—at least metaphorically.
When Night Falls
It’s hard to imagine how afraid we once were as a species. How many nights we must have lain awake, unable to close our eyes, staring out into the dark. Waiting. Watching. Futilely attempting to discern shapes and forms—shades of black upon black, like some kind of mocking modernist painting. And if we did eventually see something coming out of that darkness, a feline predator perhaps, we knew instantly that it was too late. The dark held mortal dangers, and it appears that we have not found a way to purge this traumatic memory from our DNA.
In thinking about the evolutionary basis of our fear of the dark, we need first to be aware that Homo sapiens were not the toughest kids on the block. The fact that we came to dominate the planet is not a testament to our ability to physically defend against predators and other threatening species, but rather, a function of our ability to adapt and outsmart.39
Large predatory cats such as lions have always lived near hominids.40 Recent research suggests that feline predators are much more likely to attack after dusk and in low-light moon stages. And, according to some, lions were at one time the most widely distributed mammal in the world. Clearly, the threat from nocturnal predators ranks high in our ascription of danger to the dark.
In addition, it seems that our “mastery” of fire, 350,000 to 500,000 years ago, was of little help to us in guarding against our vulnerability in the dark. Yes, it kept us warm, kept a few animals away, and did define a place of certainty in the dark unknown, but what could it really do for us in the big picture? It was a tiny spot of orange in a sea of black. Sadly, light never solves the dark. It merely brings it into sharper focus. And scarily enough, that spot of orange becomes a beacon for those who nefariously wish to know where we are.
