Jung and Others on Fear Part I: Definitions and Types of Fear

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, …” 

Jung (1952)

“Fear, however, is an admission of inferiority; it shrinks back from chaos and longs for solid, tangible reality, for the continuity of what has been, for meaning and purpose –… “

Jung (1970)

“It may be useful to differentiate the differences between fear, anxiety and angst. Fear is specific. We fear dogs because we were once bitten. Anxiety is a free-floating dis-ease which may be activated by nearly anything, may even light for a while on something specific, but which usually originates from the general insecurity one feels in one’s life. … Angst, on the other hand, is present in us all, a function of the fragile human condition. One might define angst as a existential anxiety; … All roads lead… to the City of Existential Angst.” 

Given the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol and the polarization in American politics, the war in Ukraine and the economic turmoil of our time, we should not be surprised at the prevalence of feelings of fear and anxiety in ourselves and our world. Perhaps this is why my psyche suggested that I investigate what Jung and Jungian analysts wrote about fear. 

This turned out to be a huge project, as all but two volumes of Jung’s Collected Works mention fear and its psychological roots. I found over five dozen citations just in these 16 books, and then several hundred more in books by Jungian analysts. In this first part of a four-part essay, I define the terms used in the literature, and then discuss the many types of fear Jungians identify.

Definitions

Six terms showed up repeatedly in the sources. These are angst, anxiety, dread, fear, panic and phobia. 

The dictionary defines “angst” as “inordinate fear, fright or anxiety.” It is a word we borrowed from German, derived from the Latin angustus, narrow, contracted, and angustum, a difficult, critical condition or danger. James Hollis, a Jungian analyst and prolific author on fear, describes angst variously as “formless, free-floating, paralytic,” a “normal and natural” feature of being human, “the ambivalent lot of everyone as separate from the parents,” “present in us all, a function of the fragile human condition…. existential anxiety; that is, it comes from being an animal who can become conscious of just how thin the thread by which it hangs really is…. All roads lead … to the  City of Existential Angst.” Why? Because angst “remains our most constant companion.”

Anxiety is defined as “uneasy thoughts or fears about what may happen; troubled, worried or uneasy feelings; eager desire; psychiatry: a state of fear and mental tensions commonly occurring in mental disorders; It derives from the Greek agcho, “to compress, throttle, choke.,” suggesting how anxiety can squeeze much of the joy out of life. In Swamplands of the Soul, James Hollis describes anxiety as “a free-floating dis-ease which may be activated by nearly anything, may even light for a while on something specific, but which usually originates from the general insecurity one feels in one’s life.” Jung speaks of “an anxiety neurosis” as a “psychological” disease, and Hollis concurs, warning readers that anxiety can develop “from a profound crippling complex,” which, if it is “not made conscious is most pernicious, for we can never know exactly where it will go, and it will always go somewhere–into a projection or into the body.”

The word “dread” applies “to the fear that comes from knowing something unpleasant or frightening will happen or from expecting danger, often unknown or uncertain.” And what is generally “unknown”? Jung had a ready answer: “the contents of the collective unconscious.” Jung identified dread as the feeling “which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.” On the collective level, dread can describe the universal feeling we all have at “the catastrophic outbreak of destructive forces…,” e.g. the war in Ukraine. Jung also recognized that the prevalence of dread can relate to personality type, i.e. Introverts, whose orientation is more inward than that of Extraverts, may feel dread as ” The abstracting attitude endows the object with a threatening or injurious quality against which it has to defend itself.” As a strong Introvert myself, this rings true for me.  

“Fear” can be a noun, as well as a transitive and an intransive verb. As a noun, it is the state of “being afraid; feeling that danger or evil is near; dread; cause for being afraid; danger; an uneasy feeling; anxious thought; concern; awe; reverence.” As a verb that takes an object, fear means “to regard with fear; be afraid of; to feel concern for or about; to have awe or reverence for.” In the intransive form of the verb, fear means “to feel fear; to have an uneasy feeling or anxious thought; feel concern; the painful feeling that comes over a person when danger or harm threatens; fear is the general word meaning being afraid.” Jung equated fear with the “spirit of evil” and saw it as “an admission of inferiority.” Jungian analyst Deldon McNeely regards fear as one of the “basic emotions”–along with anger, jealousy and envy–which “has a place in intimacy, offering value and survival orientation.

“Panic” can manifest on the collective and individual level. As “a fear spreading through a multitude of people so that they lose control of themselves,” Jung recognized it as a potential feature of “mass-mindedness,” and he would urge his followers to avoid crowds for just this reason. Individuals can also be consumed with “unreasoning fear; to be affected with panic,” that is, the wild frenzy linked in the ancient Greek mind with the god Pan, who “was said to cause contagious fear in herds and crowds.” Jung also felt panic can arise in an individual when his/her life “has lost its meaning and promise.”

“Phobia” comes from the Green phobos, meaning panic or fear that causes flight, and the dictionary defines it as “a persistent, morbid or insane fear.” Jung recognized that neuroses are often linked to the development of a phobia. He cites several cases as illustrations: a four-year-old child presented with severe constipation–not having easy bowel movements for three years. Jung identified the source of the child’s intestinal blockage as due to her neurotic mother projecting all her phobias on to the child, causing the girl to live in a state of constant tension. In another case, an elderly widow “suffered from numerous phobias,” and Jung diagnosed the cause from the compensatory dreams the unconscious offered up: “like many other people, she failed to notice that by repressing disagreeable thoughts she created something like a psychic vacuum which, as usually happens, gradually became filled with anxiety.” Over time, repression can result in phobias. 

Types of Fear

The indexes to Jung’s Collected Works and to the collection of books published by Inner City Press, as well as various other sources, listed three main types of fear: fears associated with objects, things, places or persons; fears associated with experiences; and descriptive fears (i.e. fears labeled with an adjective). I consider these categories below.

Jung and his analysts have encountered people manifesting fears around a wide assortment of objects or persons, e.g. the analyst, animals (birds, cats, dogs, snakes), asylums, dangerous objects (knives, grenades, bombs, poisons), father, ghosts, God, jailers, novelties (new objects), people in general, and women. The list of phobias is long: acrophobia (fear of heights), aerophobia (fear of flying), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces or being outside), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), atychiphobia (fear of failure), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed/small spaces), hydrophobia (fear of water), nosophobia (fear of contracting a disease), and vehophobia (fear of driving)–to name just a few. Having been bitten multiple times by almost every dog I have ever encountered, I can attest to a fear of dogs and I had an uncle who was afraid of thunderstorms.

Experiences also call up fears in some people, e.g. fear of castration, fear around death and dying, fear of decision-making, fear of being detained or arrested, fear of examinations or being tested, fear of incest, fear of living in general, fear of new relationships, fear of being hypnotized, fear of relapsing after an illness, fear of going mad, fear of the journey to Hades, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, fear of being misunderstood, fear of change, fear of chaos, fear of commitment, fear of dependence, fear of deviance, fear of difference, fear of drowning, fear of being envied by others, fear of Eros (i.e. that archetypal energy that promotes relationship and romance), fear of falling, fear of homosexuality, fear of knowing (e.g. about one’s unconscious or inner life), fear of losing love, fear of separation. One of the most common fears I have found in my students over forty years is fear of public speaking.

Then there are a variety of fears described in the sources with an adjective, e.g. existential fear (the fear of the recluse reluctant to be seen in the world), nocturnal fear (or “night-terrors” which Jung witnessed both in “primitives” during his trip to Africa, and also in modern Europeans–in children as well as adults), the “instinct-inhibiting fear” of primitive man, primal fear (e.g. of distance, of change, of nearness and of permanence), sudden fear (as, e.g., when we spy a snake in the grass), and collective fear, for which the phenomenon of Ufos could be a compensation, in Jung’s opinion.

Some fears surprised me, e.g. analysts have encountered patients who fear making achievements in the outer world, fear making therapeutic progress in their work with the analyst, and fear growing psychologically, as well as fearing joy or success. More on these seemingly strange fears in Part II.

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