The Psychodynamics of Fear

The Psychodynamics of fear

Like all human phenomena, xenophobia too has multiple causes: it is in fact a phenomenon that can rightly be called “complex”. It follows that the numerous studies conducted in different scientific domains, or within the same discipline using different theoretical models, are an indispensable “part”, though not “the whole”, that help us to understand it.

First of all, I will define the limits within which I will be using the term “xenophobia”, considering that the field of which this study is part is the social clinical field from a group analysis standpoint.

The etymological meaning of the term “xenophobia” is “fear of the strange” or also “fear of the unusual”, deriving from the Greek ξενοφοβία, xenophobia, and composed of ξένος, xenos, ‘stranger, unusual’ e φόβος, phobos, ‘fear’. The Italian “Treccani” dictionary defines it as “feeling of generic aversion for foreigners and for foreign things, manifested in attitudes and actions of intolerance and hostility towards the customs, culture, and inhabitants of other countries”. This definition, which is similar to those in other dictionaries, focuses on describing what is evident about xenophobia, first of all the feeling of aversion, the people it is expressed against (foreigners and foreign things) and the way it is expressed (actions of intolerance).

Linking the etymology with the definition of the word “xenophobia”, it can be argued that the feeling of aversion is the evident manifestation of another feeling that precedes it, fear. The aversion, in other words, expressed by a group, by a community towards the foreign, or towards what is unusual in the manifestation, or rather, the communication of a fear: people are xenophobic because they are afraid of the foreign, and more in general of what is unusual.

Phobias (fears) are disorders that the American Psychiatric Association, in its statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV) places on Axis I among the Anxiety disorders. It is well-known that underlying the DSM-IV there is the idea of constructing a language shared by clinicians and researchers and this is why a descriptive a-theoretical approach is used in the manual. This involves leaving aside the “sense” to be given to psychopathology which, in contrast, is typical of psychodynamic research. On a strictly descriptive level, therefore, xenophobia certainly finds a place among the Anxiety disorders; however, it is necessary to go further to understand and make sense of a phenomenon that, as we have said, accompanies the (known) history of humanity.

Are fear and anxiety similar states of mind? There is one scientific tradition that tries to differentiate the two terms by seeing fear as the state of mind  deriving from the perception of a real external danger and anxiety as a state of mind similar to fear but without the external danger. On this point, Freud distinguished a real anxiety from a neurotic one, attributing to the former the sense of a state of mind justified by external events, and to the latter, one still justified by a danger but this time an unconscious danger. Eugenio Borgna gives a description of anxiety and fear considering the different phenomenologies; the first indicates a “sudden, or continued, feeling of confusion and foreboding (of imminent disaster) which contains something indeterminate and free-floating. Fear, on the other hand, bears witness to a state of mind, an emotional expression, directed more to a real, concrete situation marked (…), by the connotation of danger and risk but not obscure and not unknown” (1997, p. 25). Anxiety is therefore an emotion, devoid of meaning, which tirelessly emerges from within, unlike fear which is a meaningful reaction before a situation of recognisable risk.

In the case of phobic experience, the difference between anxiety and fear, based on whether of not there is a danger, vanishes since anxiety is manifested anyway because of a danger, albeit unconscious, which the Ego shifts onto an external object, so as to prevent “unacceptable thoughts and feelings from reaching the conscious awareness” (Gabbard,1995, p. 235). 

Psychodynamic research, from Freud onwards, showed that the phobic object (the thing that instils fear) is deprived of its characteristics of reality following an intense, organised intrapsychic activity through which the phobic person transfers onto it other characteristics that justify the fear and the consequent reaction4. Since the foreigner is phobic object, it is onto him that the individual inner world is therefore transferred and also, as Di Maria argues, the interpersonal unconscious of groups and communities (Di Maria & Lavanco, 1999). The foreigner is thus excluded by bearing the brunt of the unbearable inner phantasms projected onto him by individuals, groups and communities in order to free themselves. Taken away from his real dimension and condemned to live as a meaning given by others, the foreigner acquires the guise of the “scapegoat”.

Since classical times different states of mind have been projected onto an innocuous animal, the goat, with the result that the goat has become an ambiguous  symbol because in part it is considered a symbol of fertility and in part a symbol of lust and in Christian symbolism the image of the devil himself. In Christian iconography, in fact, the devil has the appearance of a goat and for instance in Michelangelo’s “Universal Judgement”, the evil are depicted as goats. As a sacrificial figure, the scapegoat appears in the Old Testament5; during a ceremony the sins of the people of Israel were transferred onto it. At the end of the rite, the goat chosen to be the scapegoat was forced to wander until its death in the desert, taking with it the sins of others, who in this way felt liberated.

The anthropological analysis carried out by René Girard identifies the existence of the phenomenon of the scapegoat since time immemorial. It emerges every time the equilibrium of a community is challenged by internal problems that people do not know how to face, or do not want to. Up to a certain time the sacrificial victim took on the guilt attributed to it, but from the Gospels onwards the scapegoat is the innocent that gets revenge and becomes the lamb of God. This inversion, says Girard, will not stop the persecution which in fact could assume incredible proportions, as is shown by modern and contemporary history; at the same time, the sense of shame will grow. Something has been broken forever in the cycle of violence (Girard, 1987).

All the mechanisms put in place to make the victim monstrous or diabolical6, in order to justify his persecution, will not be enough to placate the guilt of he who has sacrificed one or more innocents7. The persecution and the sacrifice of the designated victim, can for a moment give the illusion of the “solution to the problem” and it may be accompanied by an immediate relief. With time, the real problems that have not been faced and from which one defended oneself by starting the persecution, will now re-emerge; the relief will be replaced by a double anguish, that of having to face what one did not want to face before and that deriving from the sense of guilt at having sacrificed an innocent victim. In “nature”, in fact, a human being cannot sacrifice another without paying the price8. Clinical experience shows that in those social networks (family, groups, organisations) where there is the phenomenon of the scapegoat, otherwise indicated as the designated patient, it is the entire network that is problematic and that as a defence, it projects its problematic nature on one of its members who will become the scapegoat9. Clinical experience also shows that, to be successful, the therapeutic intervention must concern the whole network and not just the designated patient. It is also well-known that the network reacts, at times violently, when an attempt is made to involve it, showing that the problem does not concern one person but all of them.

In conclusion, it can be said that the phobic object, in whatever case, is a scapegoat, paying for faults that are not its own. This dynamic is paradoxically identical both in the case of individual phobias and in social cases like xenophobia. In both cases, inner conflicts are shifted towards the outside in the hope of getting rid of them. The elimination of the phobic object from the field of perception is a tireless task that all those affected by a phobia perform in their daily life. The same thing happens in a community affected by xenophobia that uses its resources in the persecution of its phobic object, the “foreigner”, in order to exclude him from its field of perception instead of dealing with the real problems afflicting it.

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