Desh: Our first interview-dialogues as a methodology of East-West dialogue on a philosophy of fearism appeared in the preparation of the book we co-wrote a year ago [1]. I appreciate you took the lead Michael to instigate the dialogic interviews interspersed in that text which allows readers a more-friendly, less technical, interpretation of what we’re doing. Then we began our Part 1 online interview on FMning Aug. 8, 2016 [2]. In that interview we gave attention to questions near the end of how a philosophy of fearism can possibly relate to the field of Medicine (particularly, Psychiatry) and we discussed the coining of the term Feariatry I had created in my book [3] and further issues on how that might develop and what resistances we would have in the Medical field to our views on the nature and role of fear in mental health and disease in general.
In our book we set up a Glossary at the back to help audiences better understand the connection between many of the terms we use, and often we have to create new terms under the project of which a philosophy of fearism demands as we are attempting new insights that current common language used by societies is inadequate to unveil fear as a ubiquitous and powerful shaper of human existence. So, we gave a definition:
Feariatry (feariatric) [feariatrist]- refers to the study and application of fear-disease relations in the mental health and wellness fields; analagous to psychiatry and psychiatric [and psychiatrist] (p. 157)
Of course, the difficulty is that this is a new and awkward word right now and you and I are the only ones using it. Nevertheless, with time this will change. At this point, I advise readers have a look at that interviews prior to better prepare you to read the following Part 2 online interview on FMning. However, if you wish to proceed and merely read this interview there will still be lots to gain.
Michael: That’s a good introduction Desh, thanks. Recently, you had sent me some interview questions for us to consider for this Part 2. I want to answer a few select ones. Let me start with #17 and #19. First, “17. Have you read anywhere in the world where there is a fear hospital?”
Desh: Yes. I have not heard of one and was curious what you know. I wish there was.
Michael: I wish too. There none that I know of. I suppose if there was that would be a miracle to me, when humanity and its medical traditions realizes just how important fear is in disease and health. I am sure many in the medical field and health fields know that distress causes a lot of health problems. They know that is often related to traumas, not merely physical but emotional too. Intuitively, I believe these people who create hospitals and work in them know how much fear (and all its cousins, angst, dread, anxiety, depression, rage suppressed, distress, conflict, guilt, shame, terror, panic, phobias, etc.) can be both the consequences of illnesses and the cause of illnesses. They also know intuitively, if not scientifically through studies, that if you can lower the level of distress (e.g., fear), then you get better health generally and better recovery rates from hospital operations and from uses of medical drugs, etc. “Relaxed” and “calm” and “rational” operating people are going to likely do better in terms of medical and health outcomes. Now, problem is most medical professionals and health care providers (and hospitals) have a poor track-record when it comes to knowing how to create an atmosphere and therapies for such relaxed (low fear, or no fear) states of being. Psychiatry and social work professionals working in clinics and hospitals know this problem of fear most of all, although, I am guessing they don’t think about it that much nor were they trained in what you and I would like to see them trained in as part of medical education—that is, to better understand the nature and role of fear—or, what I simply call fear management/ education. So, the basic reason there are no fear hospitals is because there are no fear policies in health overall in most countries—if anywhere. Health policy-makers need to be introduced to philosophy of fearism. They have the power to make change from above in the system and then to implement some kind of system of care for fear-disease(s). That would be amazingly a great improvement on Medicine as well. Then maybe we’ll need fear hospitals, but if they are created, they may look very different than our current hospitals. That would be a very creative imaginative conversation to have at some point.
Desh: Michael, do you know of any such health directives in politics or ethics on a global basis that exist already that we could work from as a foundation to build better health policies with fear, fearism, and fearlessness as the focus?
Michael: Yes, in my first book on fearlessness teachings around the world through time [4] I suggested, with my Westerner bias, we ought to look to, at three, two sources in politics and ethics that are already available as universal guidance to governing better health and medical policies, if not liberation policies:
(a) “Freedom from fear and want” is the principle of a healthy democratic society that former U.S. President F. D. Roosevelt put forward as one of the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, which he delivered in his State of the Union Message to Congress. Remember, this was in the middle of WW-II, and it was a time to be bold to stop the fear that wars were causing and perhaps to stop wars period. Roosevelt then joined with his wife Eleanor with others and she took his proposal in a modified version to the United Nations because she was US Ambassador to the UN at the time. After long hard work, by 1948, with WW-II ended and a massive clean-up underway for all the victims of war, the United Nations adopted the Roosevelt’s proposal as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is really a very high political and ethical move by the UN and “freedom from fear” is declared there as a universal and legal human right. Of course, policy is good, but now the trouble is how to enforce that everyday. Big problem.
(b) the American ethical feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum had published 10 “Central Human Capabilities” as a universal document that adds nuance and sensitivity to previous attempts to define human development based on universal needs and rights; this was around the turn of the 21st century, and she had given fear its due recognition, although she could have given it a lot more; she included stating in #5 Capability “Emotions- Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety”
(c) the religious philosophies and cultures of traditional Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism have been studied by ethical scholars like Maria Hibbetts, later changed her name to Maria Heim, showing that philosophy and practices of abhaya dana (“gift of fearlessness”) were foundational to healthy sustainable societies, where the intention was to live and not pass-on your fear to others, no matter what the circumstances, and I have to say that would be another great miracle if we could bring back that kind of ethical cultural practice—ultimately, it is a practice of love by any other name, which all the great wisdom traditions and many secular philosophies also teach; since I wrote on this in 2010, I have now been researching on Indigenous cultures and their philosophies, e.g., the work of Four Arrows on this is useful [5] on worldviews that are not fear-based in contrast to a turning point in human evolution (5-9,000 yrs ago) when the worldviews mainly turned to fear-based with developing agriculture excess food and money and then later in the Enlightenment,Colonialism, and Industrialization and Capitalism, at least, in the Western world; that’s a larger topic for another time.
I’m sure Desh there are other such efforts to be found historically, and we ought to do research on this so we can prepare at some point a full Position Paper, signed as a petition by thousands of people from all walks of life, including doctors, nurses, and so on, that gives the foundational support via these citations of political and ethical initiatives—to show humanity and our leaders this is serious stuff; and, new policies regarding fear ought to be put in place to help build a healthy, sane and sustainable world. I guess I have faith this is possible and would have positive impacts.
Desh: Yes, I believe this would be a good initiative to work towards as something concrete we can do as fearists. Michael, do you think the world needs a Fear studies universities?
Michael: Absolutely. Yet, we are not likely going to get a whole Fearism University or College, at least, not for awhile. I think we can work toward promoting Fear Studies Programs within universities, or as independent Centers, like the Fearism Study Centre in Nepal that you helped co-found. In my first major educational journal article on the topic of fear [6], I put forward the basic outlines of what would need to be included in a postmodern integral ‘Fear’ Studies Program and Curriculum—this, I think could be applied anywhere that people are educating themselves on the topic of fear today—which is much more complex than it was, now that we are, as you say Desh, living in an Extreme Fear Age [7], which I agree.
Desh: That’s the bad news. The good news is, that if we formulate and act quickly on new health policies, and create a profession of Feariatry, for example, we can make great progress to minimize the depth of negative impact of the Extreme Fear Age and reduce its length of domination in contemporary history, because you and I both predict it will be followed by a Fearless Age.
Michael: Indeed, that’s the good news. Now, we have to work and study hard. We have to talk to people who have a lot of power in shaping societies, and today in this Part 2 dialogue we are focusing on the role of Feariatry in bringing about transformation that we need. So, I’ll introduce a few things I am thinking very specifically on what research and writing we need to do to develop Feariatry in these early steps. You may recall on the FMning I began a mapping of what Feariatry in the future ought to include as core elements: go to FMning “Feariatry: A First Conceptual Mapping” (Aug. 28, 2016). It is a very complex map covering a lot of territory and I’m not going to try to explain that here—it would take a book to do that. For our purposes of this interview, at least, I want to point to the term “Neurotic” that I made central as one of four concepts to developing Feariatry. The other three are “Natural,” “Narcissism,” and “Negation.” So, to focus on “Neurotic” I believe will be the very best way to connect with Psychiatry as a field. There are many reasons I think this, and it is also intuitive to me, because all mental health problems or distresses, and dysfunctions that need treatment and correction, healing and transformation, really, if you think of it, come down to a person, a group, an institution, or a society suffering from neuroses, more or less in degree and complexity and seriousness. Psychiatry, although not totally resistant to inputs from philosophers, and sociologists, and political scientists, really likes to keep its focus on biomedical paradigms—that is, biomedicine and psychology as the two main contributions to how to practice medicine, in this case psychiatry. Psychiatrists may get some psychotherapy training but not much, they are mostly medical doctors of the mind/psyche and they mostly in the West today use “drugs” to cure. Now, there is a long tradition in all Indigenous cultures of having shamans, witchdoctors, or whatever one wants to call them, both men and women, and they did use “drugs” and other techniques of hypnosis, placebo effect, ritual, and so on to help people and their communities. My sense is that what all of these medicine peoples are doing is treating neuroses of one kind or another. So, of course, Sigmund Freud is really, in the Western contemporary world of medicine, and science, which he was proud to be a scientist, and psychoanalyst. Many critics think he was a ‘nut case’ himself or ‘quack doctor’ etc. Indeed, there may be some good evidence for faults that Freud had, but his insights into the nature and role of neurosis, and what he and Oscar Pfister, one of Freud’s students, call the fear-neurosis. I believe this is the unit of analysis we ought to, as fearists using a philosophy of fearism, focus on—and thus make it legitimate to have a conversation with psychiatrists for example who know neurosis is key to understanding diseases of all kinds, especially the so-called “mental disorders” in the DSMV manual of psychiatric disorders.
Desh: So, if I understand you right Michael, you are suggesting that the feariatrist will be more successful in promoting a philosophy of fearism and its practices once a dialogue is established with psychiatrists and doctors, so to act as a bridge into the world of Medicine and Wellness.
Michael: That’s right. We fearists and feariatrists will have to learn to speak their psychiatric language, in part, in order to communicate effectively and show them what we have to offer and that we respect their views too. Of course, we also have to do solid “scientific” research on fear in this way--but we will do it from a fearist perspective, which so far, no one else is doing in the medical field. That’s a problem. We need validity and trust between us. We need funding. I think the moment you coined Feariatry as a possibility, Desh, that changed everything in human history to move in that good direction—the direction of the bridge. Although, I am sure there will be great resistance against the term among psychiatrists and others in Medicine. But we mustn’t let that stop us from being compassionate, patient, and creating dialogue anyways, and not giving up on the possibilities of a bridge. Eventually, we will find ‘insiders’ in Psychiatry and Medicine who can help us build this bridge and talk to their colleagues and do research that is scientific, etc. We need them as allies, or else we will remain in the margins and can do some good work in the public domain with fearism, yet, it will be limited if we don’t also get to engage effectively with those in power of much of health systems and policies.
Desh: So, you think a building block for this bridge you speak about is fear-neurosis? It is so interesting that the term “neuroses” has become so well-recognized by many people around the world since Freud’s movement of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has also had a great impact on literature. I have not read much of it, and yet, I don’t think many people who have heard the word actually know what it meant to Freud and his followers in psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology in general.
Michael: I agree. My own study is very meager in psychoanalysis but I have had a growing interest in the last several years, mostly reading post-Freudians. Oh, and then we’re going to encounter even in mentioning Freud’s name a kind of Freudianophobia. People were then, and are now, quite fearful of Freud anything, and depth psychology as well, as which is the kind of psychology where Freud, Jung, etc. belong. There have been several scholars in the history of W. psychology who have remarked that Psychoanalysis is the First Wave of Psychology, with the Second Wave as Behaviorism (which morphed into Cognitivism), and the Third Wave as Humanistic-Existential Psychology, and the Fourth Wave as Transpersonal Psychology—and, some, like myself see Integral Psychology as a Fifth Wave in the evolution of types of psychology. I think a case could be made that Soren Kierkegaard was the West’s grand psychologist of fear, then perhaps second most important was Sigmund Freud, then third Martin Heidegger, although, officially Kierkegaard and Heideggre they are both existentialist philosophers.Freud apparently didn’t have a lot of patience for the use of philosophy for anything. Yet, in many ways, he was also quite philosophical. These are major precursors and roots, be they conscious to you or me, or not. They cannot be ignoredin the development of a philosophy of fearism coined by you Desh in 1999.This is a point you and I make in our article submitted to Philosophy Now magazine [8] that is planning in all likelihood to publish it in 2017. Anyways, I don’t want to get us distracted on history—and, I’m sure the Eastern view of the history of the psychology of fear is quite different and the West. Lest I say more, Freud was extremely important in understanding the psychology of fear—and, neurosis was his core related concept, as I will argue using Pfister’s work below. Btw, I first mention Pfister’s influence on my thinking in my blogpost on the FMning Oct. 20/16 “Love, Fear, and the US Election 2016.”
Desh: Tell me more of why you think thispsychoanalytic neurosis concept is a building block for feariatry?
Michael: It will take another dialogue-interview, Part 3, as this one is already quite long. What I will say is that I am very optimistic right now of this exchange. Desh, you have written “fear can be a disease” [9]affecting all of us to some degree, and it raises then the question of how best to treat it(?); and, as you’ve said in your teaching on feariatry and feariatric practices that it will have to be a different way than most of psychiatry and psychotherapy. That’s a long conversation too. So, if you were to say the fearist ought to use the unit term of analysis:fear-disease when we speak of the field of feariatry, then that is a good beginning to show how there is some analogy and metaphor perhaps that links fear-disease with what Pfister calls fear-neurosis, and he is coining that term from Freud’s work on neurosis, as I recall. I have been reading articles on Oscar Pfister written by a psychoanalyst and academic [10], and reading a 500 pp book by Pfister [11] that tracks out, in good fearist approach I would say, the entire history of Christianity and much of Western thought based on looking at the impact of fear. It’s a marvelous rare find, and little known work. It ought to be a text for the learners of a philosophy of fearism, and especially feariatry. The latter is due to him being a lay psychoanalyst trained in the best schools of psychoanalysis in Switzerland at the time (turn of the 20th century). In Part 3, I’ll give more background to Pfister, who was also a Protestant theologian and pastoral care professional for nearly 50 years in Switzerland. He has great clinical field experience and is well versed in Freudian theory and puts his own ‘corrections’ on Freud’s limitations. I like that. As well he was both critical and respectfulof Freud and a friend until Freud’s death in 1939. The key quotes that stood out to make me think about this focus on building a bridge between feariatry and psychiatry was:
“The removal of neurotic traits from religion is effected in principle in the same way as the cure of non-religious neurotics, i.e. mainly by the restoration of love.... [while, simultaneously recognizing the] exceedingly important problem, that of fear.” (p. 25)
“Medicine itself cannot solve the problem of fear.” (p. 26)
“Hitherto, or at least until recently, the problem of fear has been gravely neglected by the mental sciences. Great as is the part obviously played by fear in the life of individuals and peoples, officially psychology devoted hardly any attention to it. Where it did not prefer to observe complete silence it confined itself to meaningless and inadequate descriptions and headlines. On the origins of fear, on the laws which govern its effects, on the way in which it modified thought, sensation and volition, whether consciously or after it has been repressed into the unconscious, on the modifications taking place in the unconscious and on the changes resulting in turn in the conscious mind, psychology had nothing to say.... Recently, the meaning of fear has been more precisely defined in several directions. The pioneer work was done by the theory of neuroses [a la Freud] and by psychiatry, both of which grasped the fact that the diseases with which they dealt were mostly very closely connected with the problem of fear, and that if this problem were neglected, they must remain inscrutable. The study of this field was undertaken with remarkable zeal and led to important results [e.g., psychoanalysis] which can no longer be neglected by the mental sciences under pain of accepting severe handicaps.” (p. 29)
“The problem of fear.... our subject consequently ranges wide and deep.” (p. 34)
“The most thorough and successful treatment of the psychological problem of fear is that of Sigmund Freud.... In his General Theory of Neuroses (1917) he describes fear as the reaction of the ego to the internal danger of a threatening inhibition [to love].” (p. 49)
“Rudolf Brun admits that there are valid reasons for assuming that fear is a primary symptom [if not cause] in every neurosis.” (p. 56)
“Every psycho-neuroses and most psychoses emerge from such an instinctive drive to repel fear [i.e., manage fear]...”. (p. 61)
Desh: Okay, these are interesting quotes from Pfister and stir the fearist to think critically and reflectively on what is being declared. Similar conclusions regarding the insufficiencies regarding a careful study of fear in psychology, psychiatry and philosophy as we know them, are consistent in Pfister’s critique and a philosophy of fearism.
Michael: Indeed.It is probably a big enough spoonful of material to bring this interview-dialogue to a close; to be continued in Part 3. At this point, I am just a beginner, amateur in understanding the arguments in Pfister’s book, or for that matter in Freud and psychoanalysis in general, so I am not saying anything here is “the only” truth. I need more time to be with this material. So, anyways, thanks Desh for this discussion.
Desh: Thank you Michael.
End Notes
1. Fisher, R. M., and Subba, D. (2016). Philosophy of fearism: A first East-West dialogue. Australia: Xlibris.
2. “Fearology, Feariatry, Fearanalysis (1): Three Pillars of a Philosophy of Fearism.”
3. Subba, D. (2014). Philosophy of fearism: Life is conducted, directed and controlled by the fear. Australia: Xlibris, 156, 160-61.
4. Fisher, R. M. (2010). The world’s fearlessness teachings: A critical integral approach to fear management/education for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 192.
5. Four Arrows (Jacobs, D. T.) (2016). Point of departure: Returning to a more authentic worldview for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
6. Fisher, R. M. (2006). Invoking ‘Fear’ Studies. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 22(4), 39-71.
7. Subba (2014). pp. 44-45.
8. Fisher, R. M., and Subba, D. (submitted). Why a philosophy of fearism? Philosophy Now.
9. From 20 questions you put to me for this interview-dialogue (Subba pers. comm. Oct. 25, 2016)
10. Dr. Roger Frie, Educational Psychology, Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada and I have exchanged some emails, he’s sent me several of his articles on Pfister and Freud, and he is somewhat curious about our work on fearism somewhat but we have yet to establish mutual interests.
11. Pfister, O. (1948). Christianity and fear: A study in history and in the psychology and hygiene of religion. [Trans. W. H. Johnston]. NY: The Macmillan Co. [original in Gr., 1944]
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