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Review of The Book of Phobias & Manias: A History of Obsession, by Kate Summerscale, Penguin Books, 256 pp., $20.
Nikola Tesla, the Serbian American who invented the alternating current induction motor, suffered from arithmomania, a pathological desire to count. He walked three times around each building before entering it. Attracted as well by numbers divisible by three, he demanded 18 towels at hotels and 18 napkins at the dining room table.
In The Book of Phobias & Manias, by Kate Summerscale, the former literary editor of London’s Daily Telegraph and the author of, among other books, The Wicked Boy and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, draws on the experiences of Tesla and dozens and dozens of other afflicted people in her informative, fascinating, and macabre encyclopedia of 99 obsessions.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5), of the American Psychiatric Association, to qualify as a phobia (a compulsion to avoid something) or a mania (a compulsion to do something), an obsession must be excessive, unreasonable, and interfere with normal functioning for six months or more. Studies indicate that about 7 percent of human beings (more children than adults, more women than men) experience a phobia at some point in their lives. And a much higher percentage have milder fears sometimes referred to as phobias.
Summerscale acknowledges that a large chunk of the 99 obsessions do not fit the DSM-5 criteria. Examples of these aversions include globophobia (balloons), hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (long words); plutomania (the ninth planet in the solar system); pogonophobia (beards), popcorn phobia, homophobia, and egomania.
Causes
As she lays out “the real and tormenting conditions” that accompany many phobias and manias, Summerscale includes information about the factors causing them. In the introduction to the book, it’s worth noting, she says that causes are much disputed. She does not, however, assess the validity of these factors.
Phobias attributed to our evolutionary inheritance, she cautions, rely on post hoc reasoning, and do not account for many phobias or why some individuals fall prey to them while others do not. And yet, along with physiological causes, evolutionary explanations appear frequently in her narrative. Animal behaviorist and anthropologist Lynn Isbell, we learn, has speculated that the fear of snakes (ophidiophobia) shaped the evolution of the human brain, and its enhanced capacity to identify and decode visuals and cues. “If she is right,” Summerscale adds, this phobia helped our species “use words, imagine and reflect.”
Although Summerscale cites critics who allege that psychoanalysts often put ideas into the heads of their patients, who then internalize them, Sigmund Freud, repressed and recovered memories, and discrete events (e.g., individuals suffering from a fear of thunderstorms who survived bombings during World War II) play prominent roles in The Book of Phobias & Manias.
Treatments
Summerscale also declines to assess the various and sundry treatments of phobias. She seems to endorse cognitive-behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, reporting only their successes. Some kleptomaniacs, she writes, use drugs to dull the thrill of shoplifting; some try aversion therapy, holding their breath to the point of pain when they imagine their next theft.
Summerscale often passes along speculative claims with little or no editorial comment. To stem an outbreak of spirit possession (demonomania) in the Alpine town of Morzine in the middle of the 19th century, she tells us, secular authorities organized distractions such as concerts and dances, sent the afflicted to hospitals, and restricted religious activities. Because the fits at Morzine reflected “the dying spasms of the medieval world,” she writes, reclassifying the women as “sick, dishonest or imbecilic,” suffering from an individual rather than a collective malady, according to the precepts of science rather than the church, may have been “the saving factor.”
All that said, Summerscale makes a compelling case that phobias and manias endow objects and actions “with mysterious meaning.” Agonizing and painful though they can be, obsessions “also enchant the world around us,” making it scary and vivid, and exerting “a physical hold, like magic, and in doing so, reveal our strangeness.”
All the more so, when we are reading about and not experiencing them.
