Areas of Focus
Fear
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“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
Fear is an emotional state that is generated by a perceived threat in the present or the future.
It can manifest in many areas of life, including fears of commitment, rejection, criticism, failure, and violence. Correctly perceiving a person or situation as threatening is an asset. Incorrectly perceiving a threat may result in unwanted consequences, and is described below.
Freud’s Pleasure Principle – simply defined as the imperative to maximize pleasure and minimize pain – assists in understanding our general response to fear: we avoid it. The particular cause of a fear is individual-specific and often relates to an earlier experience of hurt which undermined psychological safety. For example, a childhood history involving emotional closeness and hurt may develop into commitment fears in adulthood. This serves a protective function by ensuring that others do not get too close, although potentially healthy relationships are also undermined. In short, historical experiences involving a response of fear tend to result in the misinterpretation of new experiences as threatening.
References
Barrett, L., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. (2016). Handbook of emotions. London: Guilford Publications.
Freud, S. (1896). The ego and the id and other works. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Volume XIX). London: Hogarth Press, 1978.
Hebb, D. (1946). On the nature of fear. Psychological Review, 53(5), 259–276.