THE BOOK OF PHOBIAS & MANIAS

An award-winning author with a taste for the eccentric looks at what scares us and why.

Summerscale, author ofThe Suspicions of Mr. Whicher and other well-regarded books, lists 99 fears and compulsions, and the result is a peculiarly engaging book. Phobias are more common than one might think, with surveys suggesting that more than 7% of people will experience a phobia at some point. Phobias are often hard to define, although most medical researchers characterize it as an irrational fear that affects a person’s daily life. Some phobias have an evolutionary component. The fear of snakes, called ophidiophobia, makes sense given that many are poisonous. Much the same can be said for spiders and rats. However, the fears of feathers, popcorn, and balloons are odd. The fear of the number four, tetraphobia, is so deeply embedded in various Asian cultures that some hotels do not have floors or rooms with the number, apparently because in some of the region’s languages the word four sounds like the word death. As the author shows, the other side of the coin, manias, or the compulsion to act, can be just as disturbing. Hoarding falls into this category, but there are also communal manias. For example, Summerscale recounts the tale of “tulip mania” in Holland in the 1630s, when a collective obsession with tulip bulbs sent prices soaring to insane levels before crashing and ruining the economy. The author sometimes writes with her tongue in her cheek—e.g., in her descriptions of aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes, and nomophobia, the fear of losing one’s mobile phone—but she is clearly aware that phobias and manias can be serious psychological conditions. The author carefully treads the line between the oddness of her subject and sympathy for the people affected, and she notes that many phobias can be treated, usually by controlled doses of exposure.

An informative, witty, and unique perspective on human psychology.