a whole new layer of complexity to human experience. Unfortunately, the
master was a bit rigid. What it really meansbecame synonymous with what
Freud said it means. Analysis was conducted with scrupulous attention to
detail, sometimes at the expense of the overall goal.
Freud saw panic attacks as catastrophic anxiety, caused when univer-
sally repressed, unacceptable desires—like wanting to kill one parent and
have sex with the other—escape from the unconscious and threaten to
overwhelm the personality. The cure involved accepting the unacceptable,
realizing that everybody has Oedipal fantasies, and understanding that
thinking about murder and incest doesn’t mean you have to do them.
Neuroses develop to protect people from catastrophic anxiety, but
the choice of symptom reflects the underlying conflicts. In phobia, the
feared object was supposed to be symbolic of those terrifying repressed
desires, so a great deal of time was spent figuring out what those snakes
and spiders reallymeant. It was this sort of thinking that gave us the list
of Greek names for every imaginable fear. Freud himself was reputedly
phobic of cocks crowing.
Freud never said anything about PTSD, because it didn’t exist as a
separate entity in his day. Nevertheless, popular misinterpretation of
Freud’s theories still haunts our thinking about this disorder. We’ll look at
some of the conceptual problems later in this chapter.
By the end of World War II psychoanalysis was quite fashionable. An
oversimplified version became a part of popular culture. A lot of people
thought, and still think, that everything relates to sex, and that remem-
bering repressed memories somehow cures mental illness.
Psychoanalysts did search for repressed memories, not of real events,
but of unacceptable fantasies about sex and aggression. Since Freud’s time
we’ve discovered that sometimes the fantasies about incest were true.
Oedipus stepped out of the unconscious and became a real live monster.
In the shadow of real monsters, many people have forgotten some of
the more remarkable psychoanalytic insights, like the notion that the most
frightening things in the world are not what happens to you, but the unac-
ceptable parts of yourself. Repression is not so much of events, as of clues
that you are meaner, more cowardly, or a more lascivious person than you
think you ought to be.
94 ❧Explosions into Fear