Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The History of Our Fears and Obsessions with Kate Summerscale

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Joining Sharon on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting today is author Kate Summerscale. She recently wrote The Book of Phobias & Manias, which highlights the history of our fears and obsessions. How come so many of us find dolls and clowns unnerving? Why do we react with a shriek when we see a mouse skitter across the kitchen floor? And what super famous American entrepreneur suffered from koumpounophobia... the fear of buttons? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. Oh my gosh, today's topic, so interesting. I didn't even know I was interested in this until I started chatting with author Kate Summerscale, and now I can't stop thinking about it. She has written a book called The Book of Phobias and Manias, A History of Obsession. And so this is not a book of psychology that's going to tell us how to diagnose things like agoraphobia. It is about the historical context of how many of these phobias and manias began. It's so interesting. Oh my goodness. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Well, I am really excited to be chatting about this fascinating topic, and I'm so excited to be

welcoming author Kate Summerscale to the show today. Thanks for being here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. Tell everybody, first of all, where you're from. I'm sure they will hear that we have different accents. I'm British. I live in London. I wanted to chat with you today about your new book, which is unlike any book I have ever read. And I have read a few, probably a few thousand books. And I just think so many people will find this fascinating. And your new book is called The Book of Phobias and Manias. And heads up to everybody listening to this, it is not at all related to clinical diagnostics. It is not a book about how to overcome phobias and manias. It is really about the history of phobias and manias. And I found that so interesting. Let's

start, first of all, by telling everybody, can you define the terms phobias and manias? Well, phobias is put very simply a compulsion to avoid something, an aversion or very strong fear. And a mania is a compulsion to do something. As a diagnosis, mania has fallen very much out of fashion. We instead often talk about things like obsessive compulsive disorders or collective panics or mass hysteria but phobia is still very much used as a diagnosis and according to the American Psychiatric Association's definition it needs to be an extreme and irrational aversion or fear that has lasted for six months or more and that interferes with daily life. So that's how you get diagnosed with a phobia. But in fact, many of us have aversions or dislikes or things that make us squirm that we might refer to as phobias. And it's just a

question of degree, really, whether it's something that's diagnosed as an anxiety disorder or is just a little quirk that we carry with us. What made you interested in this topic? What made you interested in cataloging phobias and manias? They're cataloged in sort of this very interesting alphabetical manner, and then there's a description of them and that sort of a historical connection to this phobia. What made you interested in this topic? I think I'm always drawn to stories about sort of everyday madness, kind of behaviors, fixations, obsessions that kind of verge on the insane, but are actually part of many ordinary people's experience. And these are the quintessentially, that's what phobias and manias are. They're sort of extreme obsessive states that we carry with us.

And I just, realising that most of these conditions had been named in the last couple of hundred years at very specific cultural moments, I was fascinated to find out what caused that behavior or anxiety to be labeled, how it was labeled, what were the earliest cases, because I thought it could tell us something. Going to the roots of things can often, both of words and of the history of a diagnosis or term, can often help us understand something about the anxieties that we have now. So there are also anxiety disorders of one sort or another, but by going back into history and finding when they were identified or invented, I felt I could get a perspective on the modern condition too.

I felt I could get a perspective on the modern condition too. Well, there are a lot of phobias in this book that I have never heard of. And so it was very interesting to read things that perhaps other people have a very strong aversion to. But one of the things that stuck out to me was a phobia that so many people I know have, which is a phobia where people are afraid of dolls. And I'm not talking about like a cabbage patch at Target or a British equivalent of like something you'd give to a toddler. There is something about a doll on a shelf that people are just like, get that out of here. It is creepy. I don't want

it to look at me. It's going to come to life, probably haunted, you know, like all the reasons that people have about like, I don't get that out of here. Can you talk a little bit more about some specific phobias, maybe that one or others that you find interesting. Yeah, the dull phobia is interesting. It's a feeling of the uncanny. It's something that's similar to us and yet different in a way that's profoundly unsettling. And I think there are quite a few of the phobias in here that have that feeling of something sort of uncannily human, but inhuman. This phobia of clowns, which took hold in the 1980s in the States, that was really fascinating to me because there seemed such a clear sequence of historical events, recent historical events

that set it in motion. historical events that set it in motion. First of all, there was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was caught in 1979, had murdered 33 men and boys, and was pictured in the papers in a clown costume. And this seemed to instill a sort of mass panic, as it were, and stalker clowns were spotted everywhere. Children became phobic about clowns. And then in 1986, Stephen King wrote a book featuring a scary clown, It, which has since been filmed, of course, and that just cemented the figure of the predator clown, the terrifying clown in the popular imagination. And so there is an example of where you see real-world events sort of triggering a new fear and that fear becoming sort of contagious, emotionally contagious, as so much fear is.

Often we learn even a familiar or simple fear like a fear of spiders by seeing someone else be scared of a spider. So there are really intriguing mixture phobias of something that feels reflexive, embedded in us, maybe dates from our prehistory and has its traces in our lizard brains, but also needs to be awakened by real world experience. And that can be something very personal, private, like a scary encounter, a shock. But it can also be watching a movie, or seeing your mom scream in horror when she sees a mouse. And so the roots of these fears, and obsessions are as various as that you know biological cultural personal and each case is

slightly different but I think that people will find much to recognize in these stories too I thought when I started researching the book I didn't consider myself particularly phobic or manic though there were a couple of I don't't like flying, you know, mildly phobic about that. But actually, the more I thought about all these things, the more I was persuaded, the more I saw that we've all got the seeds of these fears and anxieties. And at some level, all these irrational fears are also rational. How are our irrational fears rational? Well, in evolutionary terms, a lot of these fears made sense. So it made sense to be scared of

snakes a long time ago, because we might encounter them and they were very dangerous to us, some snakes in some places. Similarly, a fear of heights is obviously quite a useful reflex to have to make sure you don't fall off a cliff. And a fear of water is self-preserving. But when they survive into situations where they're no longer needed and where they actually impede your safety. For example, if a fear of water gets in the way of you learning to swim, then the fear of water is working against your self-preservation. Then they become irrational. And if you live in a society or a country where there are no poisonous snakes, it makes

no sense to be scared of snakes. But perhaps somewhere, and there is some evidence, there have been experiments to establish this, that some of these fears are laid down so deep in us from before our prefrontal cortex is even developed that they are just there waiting to be awoken. So that's one way in which fears, even irrational fears, have a sort of logical origin. And similarly, all the fears that are related to disgust. So maybe a fear of insects, things that we recoil from. Alfred Hitchcock was terrified of eggs. These sort of substances, kind of squelchy, You know, something of these sort of substances, kind of squelchy, slimy, gelatinous substances, that it does make sense or it did make sense once to recoil from those things because they might carry disease or dirt. They might make us sick. So a lot of this stuff can be traced back to that. But in many cases, it's undergone various mutations and transformations.

So you wouldn't recognize that that's what we were responding to. There's a surprisingly common and very mysterious fear of buttons known as Kumponophobia, which apparently Steve Jobs suffered from, which is why he always wore those turtleneck sweaters. What? What? from which is why he always wore those turtleneck sweaters what what but when I mentioned because this is a it's a phobia that particularly intrigues me because it seems so surprising I did know somebody worked with somebody who had it and she couldn't wear buttons on her clothes but when I've mentioned it to people as often as not they they go, yes, my mum's got that. Or even, oh, yeah, I've got that. I was having lunch with a friend and he said he had it and then pointed out that his girlfriend sitting opposite had no buttons on her clothes either for fear of

triggering his phobia. And that phobia, there is evidence to suggest that a lot of people who suffer from it find buttons disgusting. These buttons have attached themselves to the disgust reflex. So you recoil from them as if they're diseased or toxic or poisonous or dangerous to us in some way. And I loved looking into the individual case studies of people who did have this fear and where it might have come from in their personal histories. I know a number of people, and I would say that I suffer from perhaps a very low level of this, of trypophobia, which is a fear of holes. Particularly for me, it's like a large number of holes that are very close to each other.

Like think about like a lotus pod where it's just like the whole surface is just covered with little holes and they're supposed to have seeds in there. I do not enjoy that. I don't enjoy that. Some people have speculated that the button phobia is related to that because of the holes on the button. Though actually, it's not clear that that is the case that because people are just as scared of buttons with two holes as many holes. But yeah, trypophobia is fascinating. And that's a very recently identified phobia. It was only discovered in 2005, I think, or a couple of years. It was named in 2005 anyway. And it was only thanks to the internet and people sharing images and realizing that they shared a horror or disgust or recoil from these images of rough clusters of holes. I think they typically, they're sort of uneven. It looks like something organic rather than something neat

and symmetrical. That's right. And it could take all sorts of forms like, you know, bubbles or barnacles or the pitted back of a Suriname toad. And that definitely seems to be related to the disgust reflex. And some scientists have speculated and done research into whether it relates to a sort of recoil from things that remind us of disease. So like smallpox or pustules, pimples, rashes, things that might indicate something contagious, or a fungus or a mold. So all the things that might be dangerous to us as a species. So it may be a trace of a survival instinct that tells us don't go near, you don't know what's in those holes. Kendall Jenner shares your phobia.

It's the only thing Kendall Jenner and I have in common probably. But I can see that. I also really don't like pictures of things like smallpox or people who have some kind of contagious skin infection. I don't want to look at pictures of that. I can see that. That makes sense in my mind. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast

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So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. What would people have done, say, in the 19th century if they had a strong aversion, a phobia of something that they perhaps weren't able to actually avoid? Like, what if you were Alfred Hitchcock in the 19th century

and you had chickens and there was no choice but to deal with it because you needed to eat the eggs? What would people have done? Just, you know, like now we feel like there are treatment options potentially. We can see somebody or some people might take medications or there's exposure therapy. What would people have done 150 years ago?

Well, I guess, I mean, the exposure therapy has probably been used for a long time one way or another. I've come across examples from a long time ago of people sort of in the 18th century being encouraged to gradually train themselves to become familiar with the object of their fear, like a frog. And actually, these sorts of treatments like exposure therapy, then talking therapy, cognitive behavioral, virtual reality therapy, incredibly effective for phobias. But I mean, more effective than treatments for most anxiety disorders. But most people choose instead to just avoid the thing they fear. So rather than tackle the fear, they just avoid the object.

And I guess that's what would have gone on in the 19th century. It's taken, and it was in the 19th century that most of these conditions got names. And in a way, the naming of a thing kind of is a helpful, generous thing, it sort of validates your experience, it gives you a group of fellow sufferers. So you're agoraphobic, or you suffer from taphophobia was a 19th century phobia, which was the fear of being buried alive, was a 19th century phobia, which was the fear of being buried alive, which in the 19th century was more common than it is now because the methods for establishing whether somebody was really dead were less sophisticated. So being buried alive was something that did happen. So by being named, these fears gave the sufferer a sense of being out of the ordinary, but not insane,

just in a kind of group that could give them some solace. The psychiatrists were naming these phobias at a rate of knots at that point. There were just long lists of them produced by the end of the century. Was the motivation to name them based on perhaps a psychiatrist's desire to create conditions that they could treat, or was it more benevolent than that? What was psychiatry's motivator for wanting to name these things? I guess that was a part of a whole Victorian 19th century urge to classify and name, to translate human emotions into sort of medical categories. And yeah, I think that part of it will have been the physician or psychiatrist kind of making his name by identifying a new condition and writing a paper about it and becoming known as a specialist and an expert and getting custom. So that would be part of it.

And in fact, that element of diagnosing these conditions continues so that I've seen people write about how the social phobias which were really identified in round about 1980 meant that if they were accepted by the psychiatric establishment it also meant that the pharmaceutical companies could diagnose drugs that these were medical conditions so instead of Instead of being very shy, you had a social phobia and it could be treated. So it's both a boon, it's a helpful thing, it's a route to diagnosis and treatment, but it's also sometimes a pathologizing thing, a thing that's in the interests of certain professional groups who might be seeking to line their pockets. groups who might be seeking to line their pockets. And it could also pathologize kind of the ordinary experiences in a way that is not helpful, so that shyness is no longer an acceptable

way of being, as it were. It's instead been turned into a diagnosis, and it's something that's a disorder instead of personality trait. You mentioned in your book that one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Rush, was fascinated with naming phobias. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about him. In 1786, he was a physician as well as a founding father. And he wrote a couple of papers about phobias and manias. And he was really the first to treat them as psychological conditions. Before that, manias had been spoken of as sort of crazes, social fashion.

So you had a sort of mania for tulips or bodices or something. And phobias were physical aversions. But he listed slightly playfully, satirically, but also slightly seriously, all these sort of phobias of rats, of doctors, of ghosts, and people who had a mania for liberty. That was really the sort of foundation stone of the whole practice of defining which fears were rational and which were irrational, and which enthusiasm was rational and which irrational.

And that's what carried on throughout the 19th century and resulted in this great list of phobias and manias. Often the phobias were named from the ancient Greek. So you translate a word into ancient Greek. So cat is ailuro. Stick phobia on the end and you've got ailuro phobia and that's a fear of cats. And it sounds much more authoritative and scientific put that way. Mm-hmm. Benjamin Rush is such an interesting character. He was a founder of Dickinson College and educated many, many thousands of doctors. But I found it so interesting that

he identified a mania for liberty. Yes. Yes. That sounds like a uniquely American mania. Yes. It's interesting that he identified it as a mania, that there was such a thing in America, some excessive desire for liberty. Still is. Still is, Kate. Desire for liberty. Still is. Still is, Kate. Yeah. That is funny that it became like an obsession that was worth documenting in his mind. And again, he was like, Benjamin Rush was the sort of surgeon general figure of the early United States.

He was a member of the Sons of Liberty. He signed the Declaration of Independence. He was a member of the Sons of Liberty. He signed the Declaration of Independence, knew George Washington, et cetera, like extremely well-known in the United States during that time. And that cracks me up to think about him being like, some of y'all, some of y'all, I don't know. Even he was like, it's a bit much. Even one of the founding fathers was like, y'all got to dial it back. Yeah. That made me laugh.

I just thought that was such a fun, a funny observation in your book. And something I would have never, ever, ever thought to look up. I don't even know that I would have been like, you know, let me research the history of phobias and manias. It probably would not have been something on my list of topics to tackle. But having read this book, I saw what a fascinating history is related to in many ways, social commentary about what was happening in that part of the world at that time that perhaps gave a rise to a phobia or a mania like the mania for liberty, or like, as you were saying, a phobia of clowns. There's so many things where I'm like, I had never made that connection before, but now that you

bring it up, it makes complete sense. Yeah. There was collector mania, which really took off with the rise of the department store in the late 19th century. Because before that, people had gone into a store and made an exchange across a counter, asked for goods, paid the money. stores, you were allowed suddenly to wander about to pick things up and put them down. And it became extremely tempting to slip something into your voluminous skirts. And the diagnosis of kleptomania was really invented to account for the fact that so many fairly wealthy women were taking things from department stores and so instead of being charged with shoplifting they could be diagnosed with kleptomania so instead and it's one of those things that cuts both ways in a way it was a way of letting them off the hook so that it wouldn't be prosecuted for theft it was forgiving and indul, but also it sort of takes away the will. It's sort

of saying these women were operating under a compulsion, a disorder in their brains, rather than sort of reading into it a bit more and thinking, yeah, but why did they do it? What was going on here? And later Freud, when he started to write about phobias, would try to, and manias, would try to interpret these things a bit more and say that what the women were really doing was expressing some dissatisfaction with their lives and their desire to do something illicit. So what they did in the department store was something naughty and forbidden and taboo and Freud of course attributed sexual desires that were being displaced on onto the objects so you see that in the interpretations given to these things there's a lot of cultural social historical stuff coming to bear because

every era interprets fear differently interprets the border between what is rational and irrational differently. And so you can see all these changes in the way that a society thinks about itself and thinks about how the human mind works at the moments at which these words are coined or these conditions identified or invented. So yeah, I found it very revealing about the anxieties of a whole society as well as the individuals. When the word gets named, it tells you something about what's going on in the culture more generally. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And that's a great point that you make that different eras define what is a socially acceptable sort of like, it's normal to be afraid of that versus like, whoa, that is weird. You know, like during the time when plane flight was being invented, when the Wright brothers are out there building and crashing planes, everybody would have been like, it is normal to be, if that is dangerous, you know, like we would have assumed a level of danger. That's normal to be afraid of that. And today plane flight is so safe that we know it's an irrational fear. We do know that you're much more likely to be killed, engaged in a variety of other activities than you are on a plane. And yet it is still a very pervasive fear.

I think an understandable fear. It is still kind of a scary thing. But now we would classify that fear of flying differently than they would have 100 years ago. And that's such a great and interesting point that what generations are afraid of, yeah, is with the times. Yes, a good example of that is the fear of germs and dirt, which really took hold in the 1880s in the States, when there was a new new theories of the spread of disease through germs were being disseminated so it was a kind of very an obsessive fear of dirt and germs but it was triggered by real fairly scientific advances and breakthroughs and lots of sufferers of obsessive compulsive

disorder might be with hand washing and might manifest the behaviors associated with that phobia but then during the pandemic I read a piece by somebody who did have very heightened health anxieties and phobias and she said it was actually kind of bliss to go into the supermarket and find everyone behaving like her you know but people were wearing gloves people keeping the distance from each other people disinfecting their hands and the behavior that had been had marked her out as a freak you know pathological disorders as mentally ill was suddenly being taken up by everyone around her. And it was strangely consoling. So yeah, the very fast, you know, in a matter of weeks, the border between rational and irrational

behaviour had changed. And we get to see what the legacy will be for those lockdowns and heightened health anxiety during the pandemic there's reportedly been and understandably a great rise in agoraphobia or fear of leaving the house especially among children who may have spent a big sort of percentage of their lives being told being kept indoors and being discouraged from associating in public places so So the wars, pandemics, things like that can trigger very sudden dramatic changes in what we consider rational and rational, and also what the sort of big fears are, what the big anxieties of the society are. How common are phobias and manias? Do you have a handle on an approximate percentage

of people that suffer from these? Yeah, I do with phobias. Manias are difficult because they're just subsumed into so many different psychiatric categories, really. All the sort of compulsions, whether it's a compulsion to pluck your hair or pick your skin or wash your hands, or number compulsions counting. I don't have a figure for that. But phobias, there have been a couple of really big worldwide surveys gathering together different studies. And the estimate is that one woman in 10 has a specific phobia and one man in 20. Then another, I think in America, it's 7% of the population. In Britain, 12 have a social phobia. So those are two different types of phobias.

The specific phobias are about the objects, actions, situations, and the diagnosable ones. But these figures, the one woman in 10, one man in 20, are for diagnosable phobias, which, as I described, are things that interfere with your normal life rather than just heightened fears. So actually much more widespread than that in terms of the things that make us irrationally anxious. But that's the sort of base level. It's interesting that there is so much more common in women. There is a theory that it's because women, it's an evolutionary thing, that because women bear children, that it makes sense for them to be more cautious because they might have a second life to protect whether in their body or as a small child infant but equally you could say women might be considered more phobic because their fears are more often dismissed as irrational

and you could suggest it's also possible that women have more reasons to be afraid. They've got less, the last long while, had a lot less agency and power in society. And so fearfulness is perhaps a kind of more rational reaction to that. And situations like public spaces might feel less accommodating and pose more risks. public spaces might feel less accommodating and pose more risks. So as with all these things, you know, it'll be a mixture of the kind of genetic and biological and the cultural and social. That's so true. I hadn't thought of that, that one of the reasons women might be more prone to them is because of their potential lack of power within a societal structure. They have more reasons to be afraid. They feel more vulnerable physically, socially, economically. They just have more vulnerabilities than men do. And another thing I suppose is that

women might be more prone to describe themselves as phobic because to be scared of little creatures, for instance, is more acceptable in women. So men who need to put on a kind of brave front might be less willing to admit to their fears, whereas in women, it can even be seen as sort of charmingly feminine to be frightened. That's right. Like to call somebody bigger and stronger to come take care of this spider. Yes. So those cultural stereotypes get internalized and allow us to express things or elaborate on fears that we might otherwise suppress or shut up about or try to get over.

That's so true. Yes. If a man was like, somebody needs to come kill this spider, they would then be subjected to perhaps merciless teasing and they would be viewed differently. Ridicule. That's right. Yes. What do you hope that somebody who reads your new book,

what do you hope they take away from it? reads your new book, what do you hope they take away from it? Well, I hope that if I hope that people might get some new ways of thinking about their own fears and anxieties and obsessive behaviors, because I think we all have them, whether they're diagnosable as phobias and manias or not. And there's a great sort of richness of different approaches, both in terms of interpreting these anxieties and treating them and tracing their histories. And I think all these things can kind of give more dimensions and sort of enrich our understanding of the things that make us scared and where those things come from in our personal histories and in our society.

Kate, your book is called The Book of Phobias and Manias, and it was so interesting to read. I think I want to tell people that if you love history, if you love psychology, you will definitely enjoy learning more about a topic that perhaps you don history, if you love psychology, you will definitely enjoy learning more about a topic that perhaps you don't know much about. But it's also written in such an immersive sort of engrossing way. As you sort of go through these phobias and manias alphabetically, it's not overwhelming. It's not like here's your psychology, pharmacology textbook, you know, like it's not it's not at all like that. I think it was just so interesting to learn some of the things that I picked up from your book. So congrats on your incredible work.

Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I really did. And I'm so grateful for your time today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather

Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder. And it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon. you