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The Specter That Haunts Us All: Fear Through the Ages
Ever wondered what keeps you up at night? That racing heart, the cold sweat, the overwhelming sense of dread-these universal experiences have shaped human history in profound ways, yet remain deeply personal. Joanna Bourke's groundbreaking exploration of fear takes us on a journey through the darkest corners of the human psyche, revealing how our relationship with terror has evolved over time. Since its publication in 2005, "Fear" has become required reading in psychology departments worldwide, with figures like Oprah Winfrey and Jordan Peterson citing its insights into the human condition. The book's cultural impact extends beyond academia-filmmaker Jordan Peele credited it as inspiration for his psychological horror masterpiece "Get Out," noting how Bourke's analysis of fear as both personal and political helped shape his understanding of racialized terror. In a world increasingly defined by anxiety, Bourke's work offers something rare: a thoughtful examination of what scares us and why.
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The Changing Face of Fear: From Divine Punishment to Modern Anxiety
Fear has haunted humanity throughout history, but its nature transforms across time and cultures. At the turn of the 20th century, assumptions about gender and timidity differed markedly from modern expectations-men rather than women were considered more prone to bashfulness, while women's social fears were attributed to physical causes like tight corsets causing blood to "stagnate" below the waist.
Even our most "basic" fears have surprising histories. Death, often considered humanity's most fundamental terror, has been faced without shrinking by countless individuals animated by higher purposes or religious zeal. Military valor, duty, and even trivial emotions like jealousy could overcome death anxiety. As one WWI Medical Officer noted, fear of death "is not a deep-rooted instinct... It is the least of fears" when confronted with love, battle excitement, or duty.
The nature of death anxiety itself transformed dramatically through the century. While nineteenth-century people dreaded sudden death and premature burial, modern anxieties center on excessive prolongation of life after pleasure has ended. Medical personnel gradually replaced clerics in managing death's terrors. Similarly, fear of poverty shifted from starvation to loss of social status.
Ironically, those counseling people to "fear not"-theologians, physicians, scientists-simultaneously incited new anxieties. Science replaced supernatural threats with equally terrifying microbes, bacteria, and laboratory-created weapons. The face of fear changed, but its presence remained constant.
The relationship between fear and facial expressions reveals this contested history. Two influential nineteenth-century scientists took opposing positions: Duchenne de Boulogne believed facial expressions were manifestations of the Creator's will, while Charles Darwin saw them as part of humanity's biological legacy. Duchenne conducted remarkable experiments applying electric currents to facial muscles to reproduce emotional expressions, believing God designed facial muscles to reveal emotions universally. Darwin challenged this view, arguing facial expressions weren't divine creations but evolutionary adaptations.
Modern scientists remain divided. Some experiments found no uniform expressions accompanying emotions, while others concluded facial expressions were largely universal, though with cultural variations. Identifying facial expressions of fear, however, doesn't necessarily advance our understanding of what fear actually is.
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The Business of Death: Commercialization and Medical Management
Death's commercialization intensified as working-class families spent significant portions of their income on funeral insurance. In Lambeth, women devoted roughly 10% of their earnings to Industrial Assurance policies. Insurance agents deliberately stoked burial fears, using "overstatements and exaggerations" to drive sales.
As death retreated into private spaces during the early twentieth century, it became more mysterious and frightening. Medical authorities tried to reassure the public that dying involved little suffering. Physicians like William Savory argued that apparent signs of distress-cold sweats, gasping, or convulsions-were merely physical responses unconnected to actual pain. Similarly, Oswald Browne assured nurses that dying patients' struggles were "purely physical" and likely experienced without "bodily or mental suffering." This medicalized view reduced death to a physiological process where consciousness quickly faded as blood flow to the brain diminished.
Corpses themselves generated fear. Mid-nineteenth-century miasma theories suggested that "foetid air" from decomposing bodies caused disease, explaining gravediggers' "cadaverous appearance." Even after germ theory emerged, many retained dual beliefs in both miasmas and bacteria. Gradually, burial practices were reformed-cemeteries became garden-like spaces of leisure rather than sites of dread, with classical forms replacing skulls and crossbones.
Yet the terror of premature burial gripped late Victorian society. Despite medical reassurances, people feared being buried alive, with campaigners claiming hundreds of documented cases. Sensational stories circulated, like that of Eleanor Markham who awoke in her coffin crying "You are burying me alive!" Exhumed bodies supposedly showed evidence of desperate struggles. Edgar Allan Poe captured this "supremeness of bodily and mental distress" in his fiction, while the Spectator deemed premature burial worse than burning or drowning.
Certain groups were considered particularly vulnerable: Jews (due to rapid burial customs), Irish (lacking death certification requirements), Catholics, "hysterical" women, and especially the poor whose "overexertion, hunger, economic stress" increased their risk. Ironically, as this moral panic subsided around 1914, thousands of soldiers in the trenches of Flanders would experience actual live burial during bombardments-representing "the most heinous desertion."
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When Disaster Strikes: From Divine Punishment to Scientific Management
Disasters struck individuals as bewildering events-unexpected, undeserved, and incomprehensible. The 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago exemplified this terror, killing six hundred people during a matinee performance of "Mr Blue Beard" when a floodlight ignited drapery. Despite being called "the most perfect theatre in America," it had inadequate safety measures-the fire curtain got stuck, emergency exits were locked, and lights remained off during the panic. In the darkness, people trampled each other in their desperate flight, with mothers torn from children and the strong rendered helpless by the crush of humanity.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a profound shift in how disasters were interpreted. Rather than being viewed as divine punishment-as in an 1881 pamphlet that described the Tay Bridge collapse as God's retribution for Sabbath-breaking-disasters increasingly became secular problems requiring scientific solutions. Professional engineers, psychologists, and safety experts replaced religious authorities in explaining and preventing catastrophes. They viewed panic as inevitable but believed its effects could be mitigated through proper design.
The 1883 Victoria Hall tragedy in Sunderland illustrated this approach. When 1,200 children attended a performance with promised prizes, hundreds rushed down stairs only to encounter a locked door, resulting in 183 deaths as bodies piled twenty deep. Rather than invoking divine will, experts focused on the swing door's faulty design. Similarly, after the Iroquois Theatre disaster, the first "panic-release bar" for doors was invented. Organizations like the British Fire Prevention Committee (founded 1896) developed safety standards, with engineer William Paul Gerhard determining that audiences needed to evacuate burning theaters within three to four minutes to survive, necessitating proper exit design, seating arrangements, and staff training.
The concept of emotionology emerged as experts sought to understand and control fear reactions in public spaces. McDougall's influential theories portrayed crowds as easily transforming into mobs united by fear, where emotions became "contagious" through what he called "primitive sympathy." When disaster struck, as in the 1917 Halifax explosion that killed thousands, Samuel Prince observed how civilization revealed itself as "a very thin veneer over primitive tendencies." This led to new forms of environmental and architectural control designed to manage crowd emotions.
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The Frightened Child: Evolving Approaches to Childhood Fears
Working-class children's exposure to death remained traumatic despite its frequency. Kathlyn Davenport recalled being lifted to view a deceased girl in a coffin, describing her as "like a great doll, waxen and with long hair," an experience that left her "petrified" for a long time.
By the early 20th century, child guidance manuals increasingly warned against frightening children with concepts of death and afterlife. The anonymous author of "The Fears of a Child" (1906) confessed his childhood terror of hell didn't improve his behavior but merely made him miserable. Religious instruction using fear was criticized for creating long-term hostility toward religion and emotional damage. Even Chicago preacher Preston Bradley spoke against revival meetings that terrorized children with threats of hellfire.
By the 1920s, middle-class mothers' increasing role in childcare brought new sensitivity to children's emotions. Parents were advised to protect children from frightening stimuli rather than forcing them to "face" fears. Popular media like films were condemned for frightening children, with one 1930s study claiming 93% of schoolchildren had been frightened by motion pictures. Fear was portrayed as physically dangerous, capable of inhibiting nervous functions, rendering children "permanently neurotic," or even causing epilepsy.
A minority of commentators warned against overprotection, arguing that "mollycoddling" retarded emotional development. Some advised that courage must be learned, with boys especially needing to "play the man" from an early age. Stories circulated of children unable to respond appropriately in emergencies because they'd been shielded from fear.
The behaviourist revolution brought a major shift in understanding emotions. John B. Watson and others argued fears weren't instinctual but conditioned responses. Reconditioning and social imitation became recommended treatments for fearful children. Alternative theories included recapitulation (children "recapitulating" ancestral fears) and the James-Lange theory, which proposed that physiological changes caused emotions rather than resulting from them.
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Night Terrors: The Science of Nightmares
Rivers' groundbreaking work with shell-shocked soldiers revealed that war nightmares possessed a stark literalness that contradicted prevailing dream theories. Unlike typical dreams, which often featured metaphorical elements and symbolic transformations, combat nightmares replayed traumatic events with documentary precision - from the whistle of incoming shells to the screams of dying comrades. Rivers documented hundreds of cases showing that the more terrifying the nightmare, the more exactly it reproduced actual events. This pattern directly challenged Freud's wish-fulfillment theory, as these dreams clearly manifested the opposite of the sufferer's desires. Rivers meticulously observed how soldiers who maintained rigid control during daylight hours experienced violent emotional releases during sleep, with suppressed memories erupting into consciousness with devastating force.
The discovery of REM sleep in 1953 by Kleitman and his student Eugene Aserinsky marked a paradigm shift in nightmare research. Their pioneering work using electroencephalography (EEG) revealed distinct sleep stages and demonstrated that most dream activity occurred during periods of rapid eye movement. This led to the crucial distinction between REM nightmares and NREM terror dreams. The latter, occurring in deep slow-wave sleep, produced particularly severe physiological responses - blood pressure spikes, racing pulse rates often exceeding 180 beats per minute, and profuse sweating. Victims frequently bolted upright in bed, temporarily unable to distinguish reality from the dream state, though paradoxically often had no memory of these episodes by morning.
Modern neuroscience has proposed increasingly sophisticated biological models of nightmare formation. Researchers like Mircea Steriade and Robert McCarley demonstrated how the brainstem generates random neural activity during REM sleep, which the forebrain attempts to integrate into coherent narratives. Using advanced imaging techniques, they showed how different brain regions activate simultaneously during nightmares - visual cortex, motor areas, emotion centers - creating experiences that feel real but follow dream logic. The seemingly meaningful symbolism of nightmares, they argued, was an after-the-fact interpretation of essentially random neural firing patterns.
This biological framework sparked fascinating comparative studies of animal dreams. Monitoring sleeping cats, rats and other mammals revealed REM-like states complete with muscle twitches and neural activation patterns suggesting species-specific dream content - cats potentially dreaming of hunting, rats of maze navigation. However, researchers emphasized that animal dreams likely lack the abstract symbolism and narrative complexity characteristic of human dreams, reflecting simpler cognitive architectures.
Despite these scientific advances, cultural beliefs about nightmares' supernatural significance have shown remarkable persistence. Surveys indicate that significant percentages of people across cultures still view disturbing dreams as omens or messages from beyond, highlighting the deep-rooted human tendency to seek meaning in nocturnal terrors. This tension between scientific and supernatural interpretations of nightmares remains unresolved in contemporary society.
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The Irrational Terror: Understanding and Treating Phobias
Some nightmares manifest in daylight as phobias-fears that exceed all others in their panic, persistence, and uncontrollability despite focusing on commonplace objects or situations. The term "phobia" wasn't used independently until 1786, with specific phobias receiving clinical attention even later. Agoraphobia, the first phobia to generate detailed psychological analysis, wasn't named until 1873 despite earlier case descriptions.
One sufferer, identified only as "Vincent," developed agoraphobia beginning at age twelve with "spells" lasting about thirty minutes, characterized by a chill or "coldness" throughout his body. Initially diagnosed as a circulatory problem, his doctor prescribed hot baths followed by vigorous towel rubbing and stimulants. These episodes gradually evolved into a full-blown phobia that dominated his life.
Vincent's first agoraphobic attack was triggered by a local tragedy when his eleven-year-old playmate was found murdered. Afterward, Vincent became afraid to be alone, enter barns, or climb hills. Decades later, he still couldn't look at tall buildings without dread or cross bridges without overwhelming fear. Despite his outwardly successful life, he secretly considered himself "a nervous wreck, weak, worthless" and envied even physically disabled people who could move about freely without fear.
Freud revolutionized understanding of phobias by distinguishing them from obsessions. While obsessions involved ideas forcing themselves upon patients with various emotional states, phobias were always accompanied by anxiety. Freud categorized phobias as either "common" (exaggerated fears of things that frightened most people) or "specific" (fears of harmless objects or situations). He attributed all phobias to accumulated sexual tension from abstinence or frustrated sexual excitation, making them "extremely frequent in modern society, especially among women."
In his mature work, Freud viewed phobias as expressions of both anxiety and defense against it-attempts to transform internal dangers into external ones that could be avoided. His famous case study of "Little Hans," a five-year-old boy with horse phobia, became foundational despite methodological flaws. Freud interpreted Hans's fear as displaced Oedipal conflict, with horses representing his father whom he unconsciously wished would "fall down."
Beyond psychoanalysis, neurological approaches offered more invasive treatments for extreme fear states. Lobotomy profoundly affected people's emotional lives, with surgeons noting that "tension, agitation, obsessive brooding, self-consciousness, shyness and excessive reserve were reduced." Patients became "less sensitive to criticism, rebuke or scorn," though they possessed a "more superficial or shallow affective life."
Lobotomy worked by blunting self-identity. As Robinson and Freeman noted in 1950, post-operative people lost their capacity for "self-continuity"-they remained interested in satisfying desires but "entirely uninterested in themselves as persons." Freeman himself described lobotomy as "surgically-induced childhood."
By the mid-1950s, lobotomy declined due to reduced post-war psychiatric cases, psychiatry's incorporation into the medical profession, and the availability of psychoactive drugs like chlorpromazine (Thorazine). The therapeutic revolution made radical surgery unnecessary as psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals became preferred treatments for fear and anxiety.
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Terror in the Modern Age: From War to Nuclear Threats
Fear dominates combat experience. Military psychologists recognized that fear could be converted into fury, as surgeon George W. Crile described in 1916. The soldier preparing for battle becomes "activated"-heart pounding, hands trembling, body flushed with heat-as his body prepares for attack or escape. Crile described combat as orgasmic, with soldiers finding "supreme bliss" in hand-to-hand killing, reverting to primitive, beast-like states.
Military psychiatrists faced a paradox: in combat, "normal" was always pathological. Lt. Colonel Ranson argued that symptoms like trembling, excessive sweating, diarrhea, and incontinence were "normal responses to combat" that soldiers must "learn to live with." Modern warfare created unique psychological challenges-mechanized terror, extreme mobility, and omnipresent danger sparked intense panic. Unlike primitive face-to-face combat where pugnacity dominated, modern warfare with invisible enemies and long-distance killing frustrated natural "fight or flight" responses, leading to psychological breakdown.
By the Second World War, new techniques of mass destruction had obliterated the distinction between civilians and combatants. After September 1942, British civilian death rates exceeded those of British soldiers until D-Day in mid-1944. Yet when examining the emotional lives of British civilians under attack, mortal terrors often took second place to other fears-particularly the dread of separation from loved ones or even, surprisingly, the exhilaration of engagement in life-or-death struggles.
The nuclear age birthed new dimensions of fear, particularly among children. In 1951, American schools began conducting "no signal" nuclear drills, where children were taught to take cover at the flash of a nuclear explosion. These exercises deliberately terrorized children-principals and teachers used graphic descriptions of radiation burns to enforce compliance. Children developed intense anxiety, wearing identification tags constantly "so people will know who I am if my face is burned away."
The Cold War introduced the possibility of total annihilation, with many considering it more frightening than World War II. Nuclear fears peaked after the Soviet Union tested their bomb in 1949, spiked again during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and resurged in the 1980s under Reagan's militaristic policies. By 1983, over half of British teenagers believed nuclear war would occur in their lifetime.
Despite widespread nuclear anxieties, public response remained inconsistent. Surveys in the late 1940s showed around 60 percent of Americans believed they would die in an atomic attack, yet only a quarter admitted to worrying about it. Many "non-worriers" recognized the threat but saw no point in fretting about something they couldn't control or that would kill them instantly.
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The Vulnerable Body: Modern Medical Fears
The redefinition of death through "brain death" criteria created new anxieties about the dying process. By the late twentieth century, people feared both being wrongly assumed alive (denied the opportunity to "die with dignity") and being wrongly declared dead (resulting in premature organ harvesting). These fears echoed nineteenth-century concerns about premature burial but were amplified by distrust of medical authority during the Vietnam War era.
Physicians faced accusations of viewing patients merely as "containers of biologically useful material." The commercial demand for organs raised concerns about euthanasia and even manslaughter, reviving nineteenth-century fears of "body snatchers." As one public health official warned in Newsweek: "I have a horrible vision of ghouls hovering over an accident victim with long knives unsheathed, waiting to take out his organs." These fears were particularly pronounced in America's Black community, who worried white doctors might "hurry death" to complete transplants for white recipients.
Popular culture reflected these anxieties with films portraying illegal organ harvesting and blurring lines between the dead and living through Frankenstein monsters, mummies, and zombies. Even within medical circles, professionals remained divided about death definitions, with some advocating for a return to circulatory and respiratory criteria while others pushed for more radical "cognitive death" standards based on loss of personal identity. Medical language often betrayed uncertainty, with phrases like "keeping him alive so you can consider organ donation" suggesting brain-dead patients weren't truly considered deceased.
By century's end, death anxieties had shifted from concerns about societal status and afterlife to bodily experiences. The "classic deathbed scene" with loving partings was replaced by a "drugged, unconscious patient full of tubes," prompting one doctor to callously remark about "watering the vegetables." Death was no longer a unitary, transcendent phenomenon but a "syndrome" measured and packaged in countless ways. Despite greater media exposure to mass death, people became less afraid of others' deaths while growing increasingly terrified of their own mortality.
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The Fear That Unites and Divides: Terrorism and Modern Anxiety
As the twentieth century drew to a close, ecological fears became increasingly prominent. While crime fears dominated much public discourse, environmental anxieties represented an even more fundamental threat. A 1991 Gallup poll revealed over 80% of American adults worried about air and water pollution and wildlife habitat loss, with more than 60% disturbed by acid rain, nuclear waste, global warming and tropical rainforest destruction.
Unlike crime, these environmental threats couldn't be controlled through surveillance or security systems. Murray Bookchin captured this apocalyptic anxiety in "Remaking Society" (1990), warning that human society was "replacing the organic by the inorganic, soil by concrete, forest by barren earth," potentially "turning back the evolutionary clock" to a world incapable of supporting complex life.
The late twentieth century saw moral panics extend beyond women's fears to encompass children's safety. While child mortality fears declined since the nineteenth century, anxiety about sexual harm multiplied dramatically. Earlier panics about corporal punishment and juvenile prostitution gave way to pervasive fears about "everyday" sexual abuse.
The September 11, 2001 attacks crystallized many of these diffuse anxieties. After 9/11, surveys revealed widespread mental health disorders among children in Manhattan, with a quarter showing significant psychiatric symptoms-doubling among those in schools near the World Trade Center who witnessed the attacks firsthand. The chaos of parents frantically searching for their children amid the panic further traumatized many youngsters.
Politicians framed the attacks as specifically targeting children's innocence. Senator Hillary Clinton lamented that "America's children lost a childhood filled with innocence and freedom," while Senator John Corzine claimed terrorists deliberately targeted "our most vulnerable citizens-our children." Parents and psychologists grappled with familiar questions about whether to shield children from such horrors or discuss them openly.
Despite the pathologizing of fear responses, the author emphasizes human resilience in the face of terror. Many people coped remarkably well in frightening situations, sometimes even embracing feared experiences. The fear of scientific advances, for instance, was often balanced by fascination and acceptance. Similarly, terminally ill patients often approached death not with fear but with resignation or even a sense of freedom.
The author concludes by noting that identifying external threats can have dangerous consequences through scapegoating. By defining what makes us feel safe at home, we inevitably define things and people "out there beyond the fence," creating bogeymen and strangers who become targets of our fear and hatred-a psychological process that continued throughout the twentieth century and remains with us today.
