Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Phobias & Manias

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

What did Salvador Dali, Elizabeth I and Sigmund Freud have in common? They all had phobias, and it's possible you do too.As ‘normal’ as you might consider yourself to be, it is highly likely that you have an irrational streak. Phobias and manias are very common, and we have a lot of names for them.In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, Kate is joined by Kate Summerscale. Find out when we started naming our fears and compulsions, why kleptomania is mainly associated with affluent women, and what Founding Father of the United States of America, Benjamin Rush, has to do with all this.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, jumping in with your fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning, Kate? Well, I will tell you. A fair do's warning is me giving you fair do's that this episode is going to contain some adult themes,

lots of naughty words. It's not a rude one, although inevitably we're wandering in that area, but we're talking about phobias today, and there might be people listening to this who just cannot be doing with mentions of clowns and spiders and heights or buttons or... Do you know what, the list is endless, it could be anything. But if you're somebody that has got a phobia and just doesn't fancy listening to this one

because it's going to put your teeth on edge, maybe you've got a phobia of teeth, then you can just give this one a swerve. Absolutely no problem at all, and I'll catch you next time. What gives you the creepy crawlies? Is it actually creepy crawlies? Because spiders is a big one. Or maybe it's clowns? Or is it heights, open spaces,

enclosed spaces. The list is endless of things that people can be very, very scared of. But we're not really talking about things that just put you on edge today. We're talking about full-blown phobias, real fear-inducing, heart-stopping, life-destroying phobias. And we're also talking about manias, which are slightly different. Manias are things that make your heart race in a very different way to a phobia, something that you are obsessed with to the point of dangerous. Perhaps it's a band that you follow, or perhaps you feel an urge to steal a lipstick, or something that you could afford to pay for yourself. Or maybe you were just one of the many people that remorgased your house for a chulet bulb. Real story, we'll get to that. But today betwixt the sheets,

we are going to find out where our phobias and manias come from. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fuck. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. Misophobia, agrophobia, claustrophobia, monomania, cleptomania, tulipomania, pugnophobia, and hippopotamophobia. I can't believe I wish to get that in one go. What are these diagnoses? and when did they become diagnosis? Well, today I am joined by Kate Somerscale,

author of The Suspitions of Mr. Witcher, among other fantastic books. Kate has been researching the origins of our phobias and manias for her new book. So, can you catch a phobia? Why might somebody be afraid of beards? And what were Elizabeth I first, and Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud all afraid of?

Cushions at the ready, kids. I'm ready if you are. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Kate Somerscale. I'm so happy to have you here. Oh, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I adored your book, The Suspicion's of Mr. Richard. It was so meticulously researched and it was compelling in such a... Are you pleased with how that book was received? You must be. Oh, yeah, it was incredible. I mean, it really was sort of life-changing because I left my job to write it and thought of it as a one-off. but because it succeeded so well, I was able to just carry on writing

and I've never gone back to the office. I write books now. Oh, I love that. I guess we've always been obsessed with murder and crime, but that particular crime that happened in the 19th century, it just exploded into the media consciousness, didn't it? And it was a mania of a sort. Yeah, definitely.

It was a sort of detective mania, and everyone was playing detective newspaper readers, Those who don't know, it was about the murder of a three-year-old boy in a house in the countryside and the suspects were all the people who lived in the house and was investigated by a Scotland Yard detective called Jack Witcher. But yeah, the reports in the press were so detailed and sort of avid that everyone could sort of read the clues and come up with their own theories. And I started to think, wow, this seems the original country house murder mystery

that fed into the novels of Agatha Christie eventually, but first of all, yeah, to sensation fiction and Wilkie Collins and a lot of the sort of dramatic, intense, emotional Victorian mysteries of the later part of the century. They loved it, didn't they? Is there a link from the suspicions of Mr. Witcher in that case to your new book, which is on phobias and manias? Yeah, I think there is.

In fact, I mention it in that book under the entry for monomani. because Jack Witcher, the detective who investigated, became obsessed by the case because he thought he'd got the solution, but he couldn't prove it. He couldn't find the evidence he needed. And he eventually had a nervous breakdown, retired from the force with something called congestion of the brain. Oh, God.

I think I've had that. I think it was as if his head just got so sort of brooding and obsessive that he couldn't contain it. In the 19th century, that sort of mental obsessive condition was known as a monomania, a sort of single fixation. There were lots of monomanias named in the century like pyromania, nymphomania, kleptomania, and homicidal monomania, the sudden compulsive desire to kill someone. And so I realized when I was researching this book on phobias and manias that a lot of my previous books had, in one way or another being about these obsessive states and fixations and phobias and manias are on that spectrum and yet they're really quite common things that all of us sort of partake

of in one way or another. And there's so many different types of manias just in that case alone. There was a poor old jack which, who was right in the end, wasn't he? He was right about who killed this little boy. I won't spoil it. Go and read the book or see the film. So he was right about that, but there was also then this public obsession with this case, a kind of group public mania fanaticism, all playing out at the same time. Yeah, and I'm very interested in those sort of collective manias as well, and there are several of those that I explore in the book. But yeah, this was a sort of mania with wanting a solution to the case, playing detective, armchair detection, everyone was discussing it in pubs and drawing rooms. It sort of made me

realised that something was going on here, beyond. the actual deep facts of the case itself, that actually this story was playing out some deep anxieties and contradictions in Victorian society and feeding off a kind of change in the culture that was making people anxious, and that there were all kinds of class tensions and tensions about secrecy and domestic space that were being played out indirectly. and in many of the manias that I explore in this book, similarly, the most interesting explanations are often to do with social change and tension

spilling out in these collective ways, like even Beatlemania, which is often thought of as something sort of bit silly and hysterical and peculiar to that moment, actually happened at a moment when the role of women and the sense of what girls and women could do and be was undergoing a change, which was both exciting and troubling. And so the sort of sexuality expressed in those sort of screaming girls,

but also the sense of agency, they were quite violent. Some of the fans, the sense of collective power that they were expressing there was really interesting to me. I'd never thought about it that way, but it is a group hysteria, those screaming fans and the ones around Elvis as well. Before we get to them, before we get to the 60s, Let's take it right back. Let's start with phobias. Is that something that's always been with us? Have there always been people that have exhibited, I suppose we'd say, an irrational phobia of something that isn't necessarily going to harm them?

I mean, you should be scared of sharks. If you see one, that's not good. But there's rational phobias, it's perfectly rational to be scared of somebody with an axe. But irrational phobias, have they always been with us? I'm sure they have always been with us. But that way of thinking about them only really kicked off in the late. 18th century, there was an American physician called Benjamin Rush who first wrote about phobias and manias as psychological conditions. Before that, a mania had just been a social fashion and a phobia was something physical, a physical aversion. Then he thought that they were sort of obsessive states of mind. Then in the 19th century, after Rush's initial identification, lots of psychiatrists started coming up with specific names for specific obsessions and it became a way of thinking about ourselves,

the idea of fixation and the idea that sane people could carry around with them one weird pocket of madness, which was a mania or a phobia. And so that sanity and insanity weren't absolute states, but you could be sane and yet have an irrational streak. And that became very fascinating to the Victorians and has continued to be a component in how we think about who we are. I mean, it is fascinating, isn't it? When you said it like that, you know, you can be completely normal having a chat with your mates and then suddenly there's a spider on the wall and then your friend absolutely loses their shit entirely and just turns into this gibbering wreck. I love that, like a little pocket of insanity. You're completely normal until someone flicks

this switch and then all bets are off. I started to think of them almost like sort of superstitions in a way, some of our phobias, but also like magic spells or something that, you know, as you say, we're just going around being normal, but this one thing can just flip us and reveal something really deep and irrational, whether it's rooted in our evolutionary history or in our personal psychology and individual history. It's like a way of suddenly flashing out this object or situation just turns us inside out and reveals something different about how we operate. So was this chap Benjamin Rush, was he Benjamin Rush, was he Benjamin Russe of founding the USA fame? Was that him?

Yes. He's busy. He's busy, yes. Yeah, founding the USA and founding phobias as well. When he was writing about these kind of early ones, I'm going to assume that they've always been with us because we've always been a neurotic species. Did he list some examples of what kind of things people could be? terrified of? Yes, he listed things. Some of us might think it would be normal things to be scared of

like ghosts. Fair. But I suppose always the definition is, is it irrational, is it extreme? And in fact, the current psychiatric definition is that it interferes with your normal life. It's an abiding fear which gets in the way of normal functioning that makes you avoid doing certain things. So if the fear of ghosts dominated your life to that extent, it would be a phobia. But he always also listed fear of doctors, fear of rats, which is common and understandable, but that can be a phobia and fear of dirt. Okay. So, you know, some of them are quite recognisable. And in fact, the fear of dirt and germs, misophobia, really took off in the 19th century when people became aware of Pasteur's new theories about the transmission of disease. And some young women in

particular, it seems, the case studies are, became obsessive about washing their clothes, washing their hands, cleaning themselves, not touching other people, wearing gloves, and, you know, many of the traits that we now recognise in certain obsessive-compulsive disorders. So, yeah, the dirt and germs one, there's quite a nice line through from Rush naming it to it becoming much more of a sort of panic in the 19th century to it being with us now. and, of course, the pandemic kind of, you know. Yeah, that wasn't a good time for germophobes, was it? Wow. No, no.

Although I read a piece by one woman who has some of these kind of anxieties, saying that it was a great relief to her to see everybody adopting her behaviours. I hadn't even thought of it like that. Yeah. You know, the thing that had been weird and pathologised about her suddenly became normal behaviour. Wow. Benjamin Rush is doing his thing. He's got his list of rats and dirt and doctors and stuff like that. When does this kind of get expanded on? When does it start to receive more significant medical attention?

Well, there was a psychiatrist in France called Eskirol who invented the idea of monomania in the 1830s. So he greatly expanded the types of mania. And generally in France, they were very interested in mania in the early 19th century and named lots of different ones. The phobias really became a kind of obsession in the late 19th century. So in the 1870s, agrophobia was named, then claustrophobia. And then by the end of the century, there were great lists of all different phobias. The names, the terms, were created by psychiatrists by usually using an ancient Greek word and tacking on phobia to the end. What's the difference between phobia and mania? Well, I think put simply, a phobia is a compulsion to avoid something, and a mania is a

compulsion to do something. Yes, okay, that makes perfect sense. That does. Are they still listing them? Are they still listing phobias? It must be limitless. Like, you could potentially be scared of anything. So are they still listing it?

Not really. So most of the terms that I've used, date from the 19th century, as I say, agrophobia, costrophobia, all the sort of familiar ones, arachnophobic. all date from then. And now they're often just talked about more generally as sort of obsessive thoughts or something. So phobia as a category is still taken seriously in psychiatry, but the individual phobias, as you say, it's absolutely infinite. You could put phobia after any word, whatever, English or Greek, and come up with a condition. But it was a useful way for me to use these slightly old-fashioned names for phobias as a way of researching the history.

and finding case studies and so on. And some of the most curious and intriguing case studies date when these conditions were originally identified and the names were given to them. Can you tell us some of these case studies? Well, agrophobia was really interesting to me. It was named in Berlin in the 1870s because the psychiatrist noticed that lots of his clients,

mostly men, all men, I think, curiously, because agoraphobia is now much more commonly diagrammed. in women. But these men, they would get sort of panic attacks, as we would now describe them, as they were walking around the streets of the city. And also when confronted with great open spaces, so the phobia seemed to sort of be both about being dwarfed by the buildings and the great spaces in the city and by open countryside. And these men would be helped if they could take the arm of a friend or use a cane or whatever. In Vienna, an architect came up with a theory that agoraphobia was partly a new phenomenon that had been created because the old cities of Europe,

with all their wonky houses and twisting streets and so on, were being raised and replaced by great big buildings and wide avenues and boulevard and so on, and that it was a sort of reaction to the change in environment, to the change in architecture. There was another theory that the citizens of Paris got agoraphobic after the German siege of 1871, because they'd all been penned in and then suddenly they were out and that this created a sense of overwhelming intimidation at space and in public, which of course has been sort of repeated potentially in what's happened with our lockdowns in the pandemic. I was saying to so many friends and family when we were kind of like finally, you know,

allowed back out, is that it was almost like you'd forgotten how to talk to. people and everything did and still does feel a bit overwhelming, doesn't it? Maybe that's just me. Yeah, there's been articles written particularly about children who it's a bigger portion of their lives, of course, and a big a portion of their changing lives, their development has being spent in this confined condition. And I think there's been a lot of anxiety reported among children about just leaving the house, you know, it's quite hard to pick up again. There was a New York Times piece, describing it as generation agoraphobia. It doesn't surprise me, you know.

It's going to show up in like 15 years when the quarantines finally get let off the latch. I'll be back with Kate after this short break. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the best. Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to

the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Imagine there that agrophobia was originally largely associated with men. Is there a history of gendering phobias? Yes. I mean, most of the kleptomaniacs in the 19th century who were identified were women. And there's a pretty simple reason for that, that they were often affluent women. And it was a way of saying that affluent women who stole from department stores, say, because it was a huge temptation with the rise of the department store where, for the,

first time you were allowed to just wander around and browse and pick things up. But instead of saying that these women were thieves and shoplifters, their lawyers would argue that they had a compulsion, that they were kleptomaniacs. So if you're rich, you have kleptomania and if you're a thief. Exactly. So if you didn't need the thing you stole because you're not starving, then it can be ascribed to a psychological condition instead of a rash, and conscious act of theft. So that was used as a sort of get-out clause. It's interesting to think about it.

In one way, it's pathologising people who are just doing something they want to do. It's making it into a madness. A woman and who might be stealing something, not because she needed it, but because she was, you know, in a sort of rational way, just wanted it, was unhappy, you know, and instead you're calling them sort of partially insane.

So in that way, it feels like a denigrating kind of label, a pathologising thing. In another way, it's a sort of forgiving thing. It's saying, oh, you're not morally wrong, you're troubled. Yeah. And so these labels can cut both ways. They can be generous or they can be boxing people in and casting them as irrational. You still sometimes see that just once in a while, somebody who's definitely got the money, somebody with a bit of fame, gets busted, like putting through a bottle of champagne as a bag of potatoes is on the self-scan item. And then they have to attempt to explain why on earth did you do that when you had the money?

The response is almost always, I apologise terribly, I need to go and work on myself and get some help. It doesn't make sense, does it? Why would you nick that if you've got the money, I suppose? Yeah, it doesn't make sense. And the creation of the term kleptomania was kind of in recognition of that way of saying that we do behave irrationally and that there may be something behind it, some need. or unhappiness that is being expressed in that act rather than a cold decision to take something that doesn't belong to you.

And I was just thinking then that it also happens when people get caught shagging around, doesn't it, is that they go, I've got sex addiction, I have erotomene, and infamia, and that's really controversial because that's not officially recognised as a diagnosis, is it? No, sex addiction was a sort of popular term, a couple of decades. decades ago, but yes, it's fairly unreliable, unrespectable. And the whole history of those labels is pretty dodgy. Nymphomania was applied widely. And of course, nymphomania means excessive sexual desire in women. I mean, it's specific to women. Because I suppose, on the whole, a lot of sexual desire in men is never considered an aberration. It's just normal. It's healthy. And so women in the 19th century were

sometimes diagnosed as nymphomaniacs either because they masturbated or because they wanted sex more than their husbands did. And very occasionally they were treated not with just potions and leeches and so on, but with actual operations to remove the clitoris or the ovaries. So there you've got an example of a word, a diagnosis that is really being used to do powerful things, powerful physical things, to sort of assault women, essentially. But it has fallen well out of favour. Even by the 1960s psychiatrists were writing, observing that what was often described as nymphomaniac behaviour

was often behaviour that in a man would be considered totally normal and maybe the label didn't really have any meaning anymore. And so we have abandoned it as a diagnosis, particular to women. But some people do still claim compulsive sexual behaviour. and I suppose we can feel compelled to do just about anything, including that. But yeah, can be an excuse like all these manias for abusive behaviour. I suppose it comes down to like human nature, isn't it? We do a lot of stuff and we don't know why we do it, at least on the surface.

And when you say, why did you sleep with that person, Kate? I don't know. Why did you do that, Kate? I don't know. We don't have an answer for it. Like, no, that doesn't make sense why I did this thing. Then the solution is to say, well, it's a mental health issue. It's a mania.

And I suppose in the 19th century, you know, if somebody said, I don't know why I set that fire, I'd just overcome by the desire to do it. In a way, these labels of manias and phobias were ways of recognising that, accommodating it, and not assuming that were totally rational beings. I mean, maybe in centuries previous, you might have thought the devil had got into you, but that idea had faded and didn't have much purchase. So instead, these labels were created as ways of acknowledging our weirdness and the fact that we are strange and sometimes don't know why we do what we do. We're not lying when we say, I don't know, why, or I don't remember, or whatever. Sometimes it's real. In that way, the phobias and mania's sort of proliferation of them was a great acknowledgement of people's variety and strangeness.

Yeah. We stopped believing in fairies and witches for now. it's psychiatry. Yes, exactly, which is perhaps why some of them do feel like, almost like magic spells or curses, the metphobias and manias, obsessive things that you feel like a spider or a button or something is a malevolent force. We're sort of ascribing those kinds of powers to objects in the world around us. So what are some of the more unusual or rarer phobias that you've found in the course of your... I don't want to say, like weird phobias because I think that they're all probably quite rational once you dig into them

a little bit about what's going on for the person. But we'll get to that in a minute. But what are some of the more unusual ones or rarer ones that you've found? Buttons, which I just mentioned, I'm fascinated by that phobia because it seems so mysterious, why would you be scared of buttons? But it's actually surprisingly common. I once worked alongside someone who had a phobia of buttons. So I knew that it existed. Apparently Steve Jobs had it, which is why he always wore his polandex sweaters, and why perhaps why his products are so sort of sleek. I sort of dug into that sort of read case studies to try and work out what it might be related to. One little boy who developed a button and Obea developed it at the dentist while staring at the buttons on his dentist's shirt,

but it struck me that buttons are a bit like teeth because there, are part of our clothes, but they might fall off and they sometimes dangle. And most people who are scared of buttons, what they really hate is a dangling button or a stray button. So it's almost like a bit of your body that's detachable, or a bit of your clothing, that could get wriggle-free or you could lose it. And there was an experiment at Stanford University recently, very small experiment just with one subject, but they seem to show that button phobia is related to the disgust reflex, that the way in which a person who's phobic about buttons reacts to buttons is similar to the way that somebody who hates insects relates to them

with a kind of recoil, aversion that is based on a sort of evolutionary adaptation, which is to defend us from disease and dirt, to defend us from pathogens, we have this disgust reflex. and for some reason in some people this disgust reflex attaches itself to buttons. I've read a little bit about the disgust reflex when I was writing about history and sex. And I found that fascinating because the scientists that dig into this point out that it has to be a really, really strong reflex because it has to be able to basically override any other human instinct pretty much because it's there to stop you eating rotting food that's really bad for you or it's there as like a protection mechanism.

So even though you're really hungry, the disgust reflex will kick in and go, you can't eat that. It's covered in maggots and it's absolutely awful. And it's a really primal thing. So it's fascinating to know that these phobias are kind of a misplaced disgust reflex. Yeah. I think the disgust reflex is triggered in some part of our primitive brain. It's not cognitive. It's not something that you sort of think, recognise, process.

You don't process it. It goes direct to the reflex. So the sight of it, and it bypasses conscious thought. Similarly, there have been experiments that show that our fear of snakes, especially people who have a pathological fear of snakes, ophiophobes, they're called. When they see a snake, it doesn't go through the thought process at all, bypasses it, which does indicate that at least some of these fears and phobias are rooted in our prehistory

in instincts that predated the evolution of that part of, of our brain, the thinking, you know, reflective part and we're just survival mechanisms. It's still a mystery why they survive so strongly in certain people and not others. And why they'd attach themselves to such random, like the fear of beards was one that I was reading about, or fear of bubbles is another one that I've heard of. Yeah. Well, fear of beards, the evolutionary explanation for that would be, again, to do with hygiene. Apparently there are sort of paintings in caves of people that suggest that men shaved a long, long time ago,

probably using clam shells or flints or whatever. And it's a form of cleanliness, you know, that there could be a buildup of dirt and disease in a beard in certain circumstances. So the disgust some people feel at beards may be related to that to a sense that they're dirty. and the disgust reflex is triggered, even though it's not rational because a modern man's beard would not normally be dirty, but that it somehow laid down that this is a dangerous festering place, the beard. You were telling me just before we started about a fear of clusters. I'd never heard of that before. Like anything that's got lots of holes on the surface of it.

Yeah. Well, you just mentioned bubbles as well. I think bubbles is a form of, it's a phobia called tripper. which was only identified about 15 years ago because people shared their fear of clusters of holes on the internet and shared pictures saying, does this do it, you know, does this trigger you and have, oh my God, that's disgusting. And the pictures were often of honeycombs or crumpets or barnacles, any sort of irregular cluster of holes for certain people is really disgusting. and aversive. So it was given the name trippophobia in, I think, 2005 by someone on the internet. She decided she's called Louise. She's from Ireland. And she looked up the ancient Greek word for

holes and joined it with phobia. So now it's a sort of recognised phobia. Seems quite widespread, but only just discovered. But again, the speculation about that is again related to disgust reflex and disgust, because clusters of holes look quite a lot like moulds, fungus. Yeah, I can see that. Smallpox, infectious disease. It might be that there's a visual cue. There's a visual sort of deep, latent memory of avoiding things that look like that because they might infect you or be bad for you.

Can you catch phobias? Because until you told me about that, it would never have once occurred to me, ever. Not once. Not once. And now I'm going to be on the lookout for it. Can that happen? Is that how like group mass hysterias start to take hold? It's like it's not contagious in like a bacterial way, but it becomes a social thing.

Yeah, I think so. I think there's a social and emotionally contagious ideas and images and phobias and mania is absolutely right for that. And I feel I've caught a few. Oh no. Right. Which ones? Which ones are you now on the lookout for you? Like, oh, damn it.

I've actually got more scared of spiders since doing... Spiders are a weird one, aren't they? Like, I've got lots of friends that are scared of spiders, and then their children are scared of spiders as well. Yes. Like, what is it about spiders? My sister's very scared of them, and her daughter is, but I'm pretty much cold.

And I'm being a bit flippant saying I've caught them. I haven't. I can sort of get myself into the imaginative space in a way that I couldn't before. I think it would be sort of trivialising in a way to say that they're totally contagious. I think they often are rooted in something quite deep, whether a shock that's happened to us or this evolutionary trace. Spiders, yeah, they're weird, because actually they're not dangerous. They don't carry disease.

I mean, of course, there are some dangerous spiders, but the places where arachnophobia is most widespread are not the places where there are dangerous spiders. It's Europe. The West is much more arachmophobic than anywhere else. yet there are not many poisonous spiders. So it's a mysterious one, very intriguing. There's lots of theories about it,

including one theory is that in the medieval times, people thought that spiders were the vectors for the black death, for the plague. They thought that they were carriers of disease. And although this was a mistaken belief, we now know it's fleas on the backs of rats, that maybe it took such a hold this idea that it's almost a folk memory

has almost become embedded in our repertoire of kind of latent anxieties. Because of course also, these things, they are spread by example. We can watch a film and become suddenly terrified of sharks or clowns. Clowns is a very good example of a contagious phobia

because that started with a picture of a serial killer in America in the late 70s. at John Wayne Gacy. Exactly. And he was pictured in a clown costume, and it was only after that that the fear of clowns. I mean, I'm sure some people had been freaked out by clowns before, but it became a kind of mass panic in America,

and there were stalker clowns being reported. And then Stephen King's book, it cemented that figure of the sinister evil clown. So that's sort of mass panic. You know, yeah, there's loads of cultural vehicles for spreading phobias and manias. So it can happen in a village between people that a fear or an excitement is spread,

but it can also happen via novels, newspapers, movies. These things become embedded in nursery rhymes, you know, the fear of spiders, there's the rats in the pipe pipe of habit. There's lots of ways in which these anxieties are reinforced by cultural cues. Tell me about the Dutch tulip

Mania, what was that? Yeah, that was an early mania at 1630s in the Netherlands. Lots of merchants went mad for tulip bulbs and they've been imported originally from Turkey and they became more and more sort of rarefied and refined the different types of tulip and people speculated and they reached absolutely extraordinary prices. It was later described as a tulip mania which ruined many people because the bubble burst and they were just tulip bulbs. So that was an example of a mania that takes hold that can be a sort of feverish mass fashion for something and everyone invest in it because everyone else is investing in it. Lesser psychological mania than a way of describing an obsessive moment in history. Throughout the course of your research, have you found well-known

people in history who suffered from phobias that surprised you? Did they have little pockets of madness? have you found? Yes, Lott's. Sigmund Freud, who did a lot of interesting theorising about phobias and how they were created. He had a phobia of his own, a phobia of trains, which he said that he thinks he caught when he was on a train journey with his mother at the age of two, and he speculates that he saw her naked and was excited by the sight of her, but also terrified by. the idea of the punishment that would be enacted because of this. And so he projected his anxiety onto the train. So he thereafter, instead of carrying the anxiety around with him,

he just was scared of trains instead. And so that sort of encapsulates his theory of phobia, which is that we project something that is disturbing in ourselves onto an external object or situation because it's easier to avoid that object or situation than to avoid ourselves. So it's a coping mechanism for internal conflicts and anxieties. Wow. Anyone else? Any kings, queens? Do they keep it very quiet? Elizabeth the first was said to be afraid of the dark,

and so she always had someone share her bed. That old chestnut. Quite. Salvador Dali was terrified by insects and said he'd rather throw himself off a cliff and have a cockroach on his skin. Wow. He once cut open his back with a razor blade because he became convinced that there were tiny insects under his skin,

which is quite a widespread phobia, a carophobia, which is a fear of tiny insects, which can turn into a condition called delusional parasitosis, which sounds an incredibly upsetting condition where you feel a sort of itchiness and become convinced that it's, It's making me feel literally hearing you talk about it. For those of us who aren't completely afflicted by the worst of these conditions, it is very affecting to think about how what's kind of awful it would be to have certain

obsessive thoughts. Being scared of spiders is for the most part reasonably easy to contend with, although some people are properly tormented by it and it does interfere with how they live their lives. One final question. I want to know if this is real or if this is a job. joke. I read that hippopotamonstrosis quipodellophobia is the fear of long words. Well, it's true and a joke. It was a word invented in the 70s to describe a phobia of long words. And it's kind of a joke because it's got some kind of Greek words in it. But it's also got hippopoto just to be silly, just to make the word long. And it's sort of a pistake of these constructions in a way, you know, the way they lend an air of authority to our quirks, to where they sound so important and old and scientific, the words themselves, like arachnophobia and so on. So it's invented sort of mockingly, but who knows, there will be people with a fear of long words.

Yeah, that seems really mean to them. Kate, you've been so much fun to touch it. If people want to know more about you or about this upcoming book, where can they find you? Well, I've got a website, katesommerskirl.com, and the book itself is called The Book of Phobias and Manias. And out now. Out now. Go and get it. Oh, thank you so much. You have been so much fun to talk to. It's been lovely to talk to you too. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Kate for joining me. That was fascinating.

And if you've managed to get through this as well and not picked up a new phobia, then please don't forget to like with you. and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hill. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.