THE language of phobia is so common today, we scarcely give it a second thought.
The idea that individuals who were otherwise sane and rational could nonetheless be afflicted with forms of inexplicable fear was quickly taken up, both in the medical field and in popular culture.
When the American psychologist G Stanley Hall published his Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear in the American Journal of Psychology in 1914, he identified no fewer than 136 different forms of pathological fear.
These stretched from the more general categories of agoraphobia and claustrophobia or haptophobia (fear of touch), to very specific forms such as amakaphobia (fear of carriages), pteronophobia (fear of feathers), and what appears a very Victorian, moral category, hypegiaphobia (fear of responsibility). There was also, of course, ailurophobia: the fear of cats.
Hall’s research on phobias stretches back to the 1890s, when he sent out hundreds of questionnaires for people to fill in about the forms of their fears. Many of the answers were from schoolchildren.
There is, for example, the English woman who claimed she had been “robbed of the joy of childhood by religious fears” and decided instead to turn to the devil, “who she found kinder”.
A boy of 10 was more resourceful and decided to meet his fears head-on. Hall wrote of him: “Decided to go to hell when he died; rubbed brimstone on him to get used to it.”
To our eyes, it is clear there were obvious social and religious causes for these particular forms of fear. But Hall argued, in Darwinian vein that fears and phobias are largely the product of our evolutionary past, and come to us as inherited forms from our remote ancestry.
The American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, for example, reworked a paper first published in the Transactions of the Association of American Physicians in 1905 for the Ladies Home Journal of 1906, giving it the far snappier title “Cat Fear”.
Mitchell collected testimony from “trustworthy observers” of various practical experiments undertaken – cats tempted with cream into cupboards and then unsuspecting sufferers lured into the room to see if they detected the alien presence.
Initially he was sceptical: the hysterical girl who claimed she always knew when a cat was in the room was right only a third of the time.
But he concluded that many of his cases could indeed detect hidden cats, even when they could neither see nor smell them.
Mitchell nonetheless remained baffled by “unreasonable terror of cats”.
According to one site, Cat World, one of the most frequently asked questions is “Why do cats go to people who don't like them?”
Taking a leaf out of Hall’s book, the answers invariably invoke evolution: the frightened person is not a threat.
But, like Mitchell, they still seem unable to answer the key question: Why do only some people develop such terror in the first place?
Shuttleworth is a professor of English literature, Uni- versity of Oxford.
This article first appeared in The Conversation