The Conquest of Fear | Page 2

discoveries
of the miraculous sulpha drugs. Science has done wonders toward the
elimination of such fears. A man need hardly conquer the fear of any
particular sickness--there is left for his conquest chiefly the fear of
dying.
In addition to physical disease, our civilization has now developed
mental ailments of all kinds. These include a large category of fears
called phobias--claustrophobia, agoraphobia, photophobia, altaphobia,
phonophobia, etc.
Three fields or professions, other than religion and philosophy, have
sought to deal with these fears, the psychiatric, the psychoanalytic, and
the psychological. The medical psychiatric profession has naturally
emphasized physical remedies beginning with sedatives and bromides
to induce artificial relaxation and ending up with lobectomy or the
complete cutting off of the frontal lobes of the brain, the centers of

man's highest thought processes. Between these two extremes are the
shock treatments in which an injection of insulin or metrazol into the
blood stream causes the person to fall into a sort of epileptic fit during
which he loses consciousness. Through a series of such shock
treatments some of the higher nerve centers or nerve pathways are
destroyed. By this process a person's fears may also be eliminated and
he may be permanently or temporarily cured. In short, the person does
not conquer the fears in his mind; the psychiatrist or neurologist, by
physically destroying a part of the person's brain, destroys also the
fears.
How strongly this physical approach has taken hold of people was
made plain to me through an article of mine on how to conquer fears.
The emphasis in this article was on how people could overcome their
fears and worries through their own efforts. To illustrate the opposite
extreme, I mentioned the brain operations and shock treatments by
which psychiatry now often deals with fears. Among the many people
who wrote to me as a result of this article, the majority inquired where
they could obtain such an operation! To such extremes have many
people gone in their desire to eliminate fear by physical means rather
than conquer it through their own spiritual powers.
The psychoanalyst deals with a person's phobias through what seems
like an intellectual or rational process. According to psychoanalysis,
phobias or fears are due to some buried or subconscious complex. By
daily or frequent talks with a psychoanalyst for a period of six months
or a year, a person's subconscious disturbance may be brought to light,
and if so, the fear is supposed automatically to disappear. Even if true,
this process is a highly materialistic one, at least in the sense that only
people who can spend thousands of dollars can afford such treatments.
The psychologist, as well as some psychiatrists who have studied
normal psychology, regard many fears as normal experiences which the
individual can cope with largely through his own resources and with
very little help in the way of visits or treatment. The trouble arises in
the case of those people who have no personal resources to draw on.
Their lives are so lacking in spiritual power, or so full of intellectual

scepticism and distrust, that they cannot help themselves. They have no
religious convictions or certainties by which to obtain leverage in their
struggles. They have no firm philosophy of life on which they or those
who would help them can lay hold. They are putty in the hands of the
fears and forces that beset them from without.
The psychologist and the psychiatrist both find it difficult to do much
to help such a person. And yet, this is the kind of person our
civilization and education tends increasingly to produce. By the
physical elimination of the causes of fear we have gradually
undermined man's inner resources for the conquest of fear.
This materialistic trend has received a new impetus from the fields of
political science, economics, and sociology. A dozen years ago
economic disaster threatened to stampede the nation. Millions who had
lost their jobs began to fear penury and want. Millions who still had
jobs feared that they would lose them. Other millions began to fear the
loss of their money and possessions. Rich and poor, becoming afraid
that the country was going to pieces, rushed to the banks to withdraw
their savings and brought on the nation-wide bank closings. Those were
days when everyone knew paralyzing fears.
History will record the fact that these fears were met, not by conquest,
not by drawing on the moral resources and inner fortitude of the
American citizen, but by a collection of wholesale materialistic
schemes. These schemes included such devices as inflating the dollar,
raising prices, expanding the government debt, paying farmers not to
produce crops, government housing projects, and many others. The
fears of unemployment and poverty in old age were to be eliminated
wholesale through a planned economy, a