Not that I have been overly keen ever on how clinical psychology has constructed an approach to fear study and research, nonetheless, this field of inquiry cannot be dismissed easily, nor should its findings be ignored. However, they ought to be critiqued, and from many perspectives.
"Fear" is hard enough to define, and even the psychologists have debated its definition over the decades if not longer. "Fear" for clinical psychology has always been divided into "normal fear" and "abnormal fear." Typically, the measures of such a distinction (categorization) is based on empirical easy to see parameters, like physiology and behaviors. The latter are analyzed as fitting a 'normal' pattern or not. Anything not 'normal' is considered a pathology, basically.
But as reasonable and practical as that kind of binary distinction may appear on first sight, it raised the issue of what is "normal" and how would one actually know that "normal" at one time of history is truly "healthy" --as it seems to be assumed in clinical psychology discourse? Surely, "normal fears" are somehow developmentally, evolutionarily, and culturally normal because that's what most people go through. They are assumed as universal developmental stages of fears showing up and predominating at one point, then shifting to other fears at another developmental stage for humans.
Now, the problem for me and many other critics of the psychology of fear (especially, the clinical biomedical schools of thought)--is that it is still not clear that normal fears are healthy and natural? What is the difference between "natural" and "normal"? And, typically, clinical psychology does not make that distinction and conflates those two concepts. Which I think is a deadly mistake, to put it bluntly. But, here in this blog I'll not cover my arguments for this problem and one can read my views on this elsewhere in my articles and books and videos over the years. I merely thought I would put up an article published in 2000, interestingly, which does a 100 years synopsis review of the literature on "normal fear" (meaning, normal fears people have developmentally). I'll let you decide for yourself the value of this, the good and the not so good uses of this kind of knowledge about fear. [my curiousity: how is "fearlessness" part of this clinical review? because, how can one look at fear without looking at fearlessness?]
gullonenormalfear2000.pdf is by Gullone, E. (2000). The development of normal fear: A century of research. Clinical Psychology Review, 20(4), 429-51.
