CLic:aao Sunday Trihune

How Fear Is ConqueredFacing PerilIs Way toBeat It

• In an article in last Sunday'sGraphic Section fear was ae-ft,Md. In the accompanying ar-ticle, a sequel to that of a weekago, the author tells how fearcan be conquered.

By GUY MURCHIE JR.

Do YOU FEAR anything?If so, remember the oldsaying, II F a m 11 i a r i t Y

breeds contempt."That proverb has no superior

as a fonnula for dispelling fear.The history of neurosis showsclearly that to evade a fearleaves that fear free to live inyour subconscious min d andgrow and pursue you, while toface it and study out its truenature and cause soon effective-ly shatters it as a menace.There is the famous claustro-

phobia case studied by the lateDr. W. H. R. Rivers, which illus-trates the principle. A 31·year-old doctor had suffered sincechildhood from an uneasy feel·ing, often amounting to distinctfear, whenever he was in a nar-row inclosure such as an eleva-tor, telephone booth, closet, orsmall room. This malady isknown as claustrophobia, but atthat early period in the historyof psychiatry (around 1910) thedoctor hadn't heard of it. Hethought he was normal and thatother people felt somewhat theway he did.During the war he served at

the front and had to spend muchof his time there in dugouts.This upset his nerves greatly,and he oIten would wander allnight in the trench outside toavoid the horror he felt in thedugout. He now began to real-ize that his strange fear was amorbid symptom, and it rapidlygrew worse until he was sent toa hospital with insomnia, stam-mering, battle dreams, depres-sion, and headache.There he chanced to come

under the care of Dr. Rivers.Rivers at once instructed him totry to record his dreams and also

(A •• oclat.d Pr ••• pholeo)

Dr. Sigmund Freud. father of p.y-choanaly.i.. who. e experiments.howed that repreued thoughtsoften are the foundation of fear.

after the many years of oblivion.The impression which the lncl-dent made on his mind is shownby his recollection that ever aft-erward he was afraid to passthe house of the old man."A few days after recollecting

this the patient lay thinkingover another dream and waspuzzled by the fact that thename McCann kept popping intohis head. Then he rememberedthat this was the name of theold rag and bone merchant.After Dr. Rivers pointed out

to the patient that his fear ofbeing in narrow inclosures un-

•

(Trlb\BM photo.)

Familiarity breed. contempt That is why the window washer. workingon a perilous perch day after day. no longer hal a fear of falling.

to write down early memoriesconnected with them in any way.At flrst he was able to recordvery little, but with practice andinstruction he eventually re-called (while trying to remem-ber a dream) an experience hehad had when 4 years old andwhich he hadn't thought of sincechildhood. To quote Dr. Rivers:

II The incident which he re-membered was a visit to an oldrag and bone merchant wholived near the house which hisparents then occupied. This oldman was in the habit of givingboys a halfpenny when they tookto him anything of value. Thechild had found something andhad taken it alone to the houseof the old man. He had beenadmitted through a dark, narrowpassage, from which he enteredthe house by turning about halfway along the passage. At theend of the passage was a brownspaniel. Having received his re-ward, the child came out alone,to flnd the door of exit to thestreet shut. He was too small toopen the door, and the dog atthe other end of the passagebegan to growl. The child wasterrifled. His state of terrorcame back to him vividly as theincident returned to his mind

doubtedly originated with hischildish terror of being shut inthe rag and bone man's passage-way, the phobia rapidly dimin-ished. Probably as a child thepatient had been forbidden togo near the old ragman. Thatbeing so, his youthful consciencemust have troubled him after histerrible adventure, no doubt re-pressing all memory of it withina few weeks or months. Contin-uing repressed, the subconsciousmemory of the incident festeredin his mind, torturing him yearafter year without abatementuntil the belated liberation of itinto his conscious scrutiny re-lieved him of his suffering.

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Speaking abo u t emotionalcomplexes in general, the emi-nent psychologist, Prof. WilliamMcDougall, says:

II The more complete the re-pression, the more does the com-plex tend to function Independ-ently, generating dreams andfantasies, and when the circum-scription of the complex is welladvanced its independent func-tioning may accompany thinkingconcerned with other topics, andin extremer degrees of isolationit may, it would seem, proceed

Try a. he may to remain calm. the guilty person undergoing a lie detectorte.t is a victim of fear. Hi. heartbeat. and hi. rate of breathing betray

him when he is trapped. (Photo by Sarra, Ine.)

wholly subconsciously; 1. e., thesubject remains unaware of thefantasies as they form and can-not afterward recollect them."What is true of fear complexes

is also true of simple fears.They can b est be combatedwhen brought out into the light.Take the natural and almost uni-versal fear of being in a highplace, or the fear of standing upbefore a crowd to make a speech.If these fears are not evadedthey rapidly diminish with expe-rience, as any steeplejack or sue-cessful lecturer can tell you.The treatment of mental af-

flictions like fear has improvedgreatly during the half centuryjust past. In 1880 the flrst sug-gestion of modern methods camewhen a psychologist n am e dBreuer devised the treatmentknown as abreaction, w hie hmeans the re~nactment of theexperience which caused the pa-tient's troubled state of mind.By reenacting a fearful adven-ture an affiicted man would oftenbe beneflted by the necessaryfacing of facts concerning thething which had frightened him.

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Out of abreaction grew themodern method of psychoanaly-sis. The famous Sigmund Freudwas its father, for, pursuing theidea by himself, he became pro-gressively more dissatisfled withthe results of abreaction aloneand came to place more relianceon analysis. His first methodalong this line was known as theII free association" method, inwhich the patient relaxes hismind as much as possible andthen tells the physician every-thing that comes into it, tollow-ing out the chain of associationto see where it leads. If thepatient has a complex the chainof associated thoughts will re-peatedly lead to the general sub-ject of the complex, where it willSUddenly me eta resistance,which resistance is often strongenough to make the patient reofuse to go on.This resistance Freud was the

first to recognize for what it was,namely, the repressed thoughtswhich caused the complex. Byencouraging the patient to go on

and to keep trying, Freud discov-ered that such resistance couldbe gradually broken down andthe patient made to understandthe hidden workings of his ownpersonality so completely thathe would consciously disciplinehimself and get over his trouble.Later Freud and his successors,Adler and Jung, supplementedfree association by the analysisof the patient's dreams and byhypnosis, but all these methodshave the same purpose: to trackdown the chain of associationtill the exact source of the trou-ble is brought to light.

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A good example of such achain of association that wassuccessfully cleared up is a casehandled by Prof. Cyril Burt ofEngland during the war. As re-ported by Burt in brief:..A girl of 14, forced to sleep

in a room well away from thatof her parents, developed at-tacks of palpitation in the mld-dle of the night. She dreadedthese attacks so much that atfirst she tried to keep awake.This failed. The attacks con-tinued, She persuaded herselfthat she was peculiarly suscep-tible to sudden illness, and thatin turn, she decided, must be dueto continual infection. Thus shedeveloped an unreasoning hor-ror of germs and dirt. The fearof dirt in turn started a washingmania. And during the day thegirl kept washing her hands soconstantly that her skin was al-ways chapped and sore. .She would sit calm and unmovedthrough an aerial bombardment,and yet suddenly fiy into a par-oxysm of fright because she hadfound a speck of soot upon thetable, or weep till dawn for fearthere might be similar smuts onher skin or on her bedclothes.". Without tracking down thechain of association in such acase it would have been Impos-sible to have realized the truecause of the girl's washingmania. And until the true causewas explained to her she couldnot be cured.Sometimes a repressed fear

causes amnesia, or general lossof memory on all subjects, espe-

The woman animal trainer conquers fear by constantly working with dan-gerola beasts. Were .he to yield to inclinations to be afraid .he no longer

could enter cage. of lions and tigers.

Exploring the Air Lanesfor Cause of Static

~ #

H. M. Hucke. United Air Line. communications engineer. and Pilot A. C. Ball be.ide the flying laboratoryplane. Arrow. point to the variola anten.na. which were te.ted for .tatic .uppreuion.

By WAYNE THOMIS

NAVIGATION of modern aircraft flown inthe" deep air" of high altitudes dependsalmost entirely on radio signals trans-

mitted from the ground. Usually pilots dependon the radio range beacons, but at times radiocompasses or loop antennas are used to providethe pilot with bearings on ground stations andthus enable him to flx his position on a chart.

No matter what equipment is used, the greatdifficulty has been found to be the reception ofintelligible signals while fiying in clouds, turbu-lent air, and poor visibility-the sort of situa-tions in which radio is most needed. Ever since1933,when commercial aviation went upstairs tohigh-altitude flying, pilots and radio engineershave fought the interference of static electricaldischarges with reception of ground signals.

Little, however, was known about the subject.It was thought that the impinging of rain, dust,snow, and ice particles on radio antennas on air-craft probably caused the frying, crackling, andcrying sounds which pilots have found to be asso-ciated with thunderstorms and line squalls.Finally, however, United Air Lines organized aflying laboratory-one of their Boeing 247D air-liners-to carry a laboratory crew in practicaltests to find just what caused static.

Under the direction of H. M. Hucke, commu-nications engineer ror the line, the problem wasattacked on three fronts - the meteorologicalaspects of static formation and studlea of meth-ods to avoid cloud formations containing static;the static- generating et!ect of a plane, and itsreduction; the testing of special antennas in re-ducing static interference.

Details of what was discovered and the storyof the tests made are extremely interesting andwill be discussed in a SUbsequent article. Sufficeit to say that it was proved that dust, snow, ice,or rain particles had little to do with static.

Rather it was the discharge from the planeof static voltages built up and accumulated onthe plane from splitting of such particles by thefuselage, wings, and propellers, and the short-circuiting of clouds by the passage of the wings

\\I-- NQSIF&DIt/, /

<,_---,,/

The upper drawing .how. the area. where .tatic di••charge. take place when electrostatic potentials areextremely high. The lower drawing indicate. theareas of di.charqe. removed from the immediatevicinity of the plane when the trailing wire discharge

point i. installed.

simultaneously through clouds or parts of cloudshaving difference charges that caused the noises.

The discharges of the static electricity takeplace from all sharp points on a plane's surface.To avoid static United Air Lines this winter

will route their planes at flight levels which willavoid as much as possible the type of clouds'where static is found; will install shielded loopantennas on the noses of their craft, where asmuch as possible the discharge of static electric-ity through this antenna is minimized; and willalso place a new trailing discharge point at thetail of the ship to enable static charges to bereleased.

dally in cases involving shock.Professor McDougall reports thecase of a Canadian fanner fromthe far west who, after a periodat the front during the Worldwar, was sent to a hospital inEngland with amnesia:

II Allowance being made forhis memory defect, his conversa-tion was intelligent, and he. . . could do .simple arlthme-tic. He could tell nothing aboutCanada except that he had beentold it takes three days to getthere. He said that he lived ona farm, but could not describe itor explain what a farm is exceptto say that it is where there arenot many houses; he could notdescribe a plow, could not saywhat it is used for, or what afanner does. Shown a pictureof a donkey, he called it a horse.He said that he couldn't bear tolook at war pictures in the news-papers."

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After the man had failed toimprove for some time ProfessorMcDougall tried hypnotic sug-gestion to ascertain the causeof the trouble. As the professorrecorded it:" He passed readily into a

fairly deep hypnosis, and then,in response to suggestions, hedescribed a few fragmentaryscenes in which a young womanfigured. These seemed to comeup like dream fragments. Hedescribed also a similar picturein which he saw two men (whomhe names Brush and Beddoes)lying bleed-stained and woundedin a trench. I could make nofurther progress. . . . Somelittle time after this failure Iexplain to him that the reasonhe cannot recover his memory

Ophiophobia. :he fear of .nake •• i. a common weakneu of mcmkind. Mo.tfolk. are afraid even of harmle•• varieties of .erpents. but men who areerccustemed to handling the.e reptile•• oon banish any fear that they may

have had of them. (TrlbUDe photo.)

is that his horror of what he hasseen prevents him from remem-bering. He says, •Can't I go onall right without rememberingthose things?' I tell him as im-pressively as possible: •No! It isabsolutely necessary to rernem-ber those things; you must facethem or you will never be well;and the sooner the better.'..A few minutes after this con-

versation he comes up to me ex-citedly and says, •Did I tell youabout the machine gun man?'And he describes vividly, withgestures, a scene in the trencheswhich he has just remembered.With a little encouragement thescene develops and he describesfreely a long train of excitingincidents. . . . Then I stophim and say, •Now tell me aboutyour home.' For about thirtyseconds he hesitates; evidentlythere is acute conflict going on.Then he pours out a fiood of rec-ollections of his home life inCanada. It then appeared thatthe amnesia set in shortly after

the following incident during aprolonged, heavy bombardment:~e saw his chum, Beddoes, ter-rfbly wounded in an angle of thetrench. He felt that he ought togo to him, and did so, in spite ofextreme horror and repugnance;he felt sick and giddy."A signiflcant point in this case

is the fact that within a fewhours of this remarkable reeov-ery the patient's m usc u I a rstrength had more than doubledby actual measurement.A not her type of amnesia

caused by fear and shock andwhich lends itself to the ~ametreatment, is called fugue. Thesufferer of a fugue generallySUddenly disappears from hisaccustomed haunts, then reap-pears. at some distant place,astonished and unable to remern-ber how he got there. The causeof his strange action, accompa-nied by temporary loss of memoory, is generally some repressedfear or other repressed emotion.alimpulse.