Phobia

Phobia, in these examples, is not treated as a fear without psychological cause. Freud describes it as one possible expression of unconscious hostility: as the mind’s capacity to suppress and censor that hostility changes, it may emerge in action, dreams, or concern for the person toward whom the hostility is directed. In the case of a young man, hostility toward his father was transferred to strangers, producing an incapacitating fear that he might harm them.

The Young Woman’s Changing Responses

A young woman’s confused condition led her to fear that something had happened to her mother. Wherever she was, she had to hurry home to reassure herself that her mother was alive. Freud interprets this urgent concern as one stage in a series of responses to unconscious hostility toward the mother. When the woman was most confused, that hostility affected her motor activity; as she grew calmer and the mind’s censorship recovered, the hostility had only the field of dreaming left in which to express a wish for her mother’s death. With a further return to normality, excessive concern for her mother emerged. The passage ends before completing its account of that final response, but makes clear that the same underlying idea can take different forms as the mind’s condition changes.

The Young Man’s Obsession

A second case concerns a cultured, morally conscientious young man whose obsessional neurosis left him almost unable to live normally. He could not go out into the street because he feared he might kill any passer-by. To defend himself against the possibility of accusation, he spent his days assembling evidence for an alibi in case a murder occurred in town. The elaborate precautions did not resolve the fear; they organized his life around it.

Analysis, which Freud says led to the man’s recovery, traced the obsession to murderous impulses toward his father, whom the patient experienced as too severe. Those impulses had entered his conscious awareness when he was seven, Freud reports, and derived from still earlier childhood years. The later phobia appeared when the man was thirty, after his father’s painful illness and death. It took the form of an accusation directed not at the father but at strangers: the man feared that he might harm people less close to him.

Displacement and Psychological Meaning

The contrast between the feared strangers and the earlier hostility toward the father is central to Freud’s account. The man’s fear seemed to concern the safety of passers-by, but analysis connected it to a wish directed toward someone much closer. Freud presents the phobia as a displacement: the threatening impulse is experienced as a danger to strangers, and the patient responds by confining himself to his room. The symptom thus both reveals and obscures its presumed source, translating conflict into a fear that appears to justify withdrawal.

Together, the cases show the variety of forms that may follow from an initiating idea. Hostility may affect behavior, find expression in a dream, or be followed by anxious concern; in the young man, it reappears as a fear of harming others and a regime of self-confinement. Phobia, in this account, is not merely an isolated object of fear but one possible outcome of a changing relation between unconscious impulse, censorship, and conscious experience.