The Hindu Business Line : Every person to his phobia

Each person has his own pet phobia. He tries to keep it under wraps to the maximum extent possible, carrying the secret to the funeral pyre or the grave, as the case may be.

The reluctance to admit it comes out of its being an utterly irrational or excessive fear of something that, to other mortals, may look quite harmless. The phobia of women for mice is a standard subject matter for comic strips and jokes.

Mice, as every schoolboy knows, have a phobia for cats. Not mice alone, it appears. Allurophobia, or an uncontrollable fear of cats, making the person scream, run, or faint at the very presence of a cat, gripped great military conquerors such as Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. The last named was particularly accursed. His consort Josephine had an inordinate love for cats, and insisted on her pets sleeping with her under the blanket. Well, you can imagine Napoleon’s pathetic plight: Every morning he staggered groggily out of bed full of bloody scratches all over his body with the cats meowing with supreme relish!

General Archibald Wavell, who never flinched facing a thousand blazing guns on the battlefield, was panic-stricken and petrified at the sight of a cockroach. So, before he entered any camp, tent or room, his orderlies had had to pry into every nook and corner and march the roaches out in solid phalanx.

Unfortunately, Wavell’s times were not blessed with easy-to-handle repellents which made cockroaches and all other bugs go belly up.

I can assure you that it is not Wavell alone who had this problem: I am proud to say that I am in excellent company in this respect. I would like you to keep it to yourself, or, at the most, tell it to one person at a time.

Jawaharlal Nehru had a morbid fear of millipedes. He describes in his Autobiography his encounter with one such beast, which, without his knowing it, had crawled up to his bed when he was lodged in Almora prison. It made him do a pole-vault of sorts out of his bed and at that moment, fighting the mighty British Empire seemed child’s play compared to booting out the menacing millipede.

The most disabling of all

Agoraphobia is said to be the most disabling of all. Persons in its clutches are in terror of open or unfamiliar places, whether they be supermarkets, offices or crowded streets. They never feel safe to be anywhere except in their homes.

(Well, I know some husbands who would not be dragged even by a thousand horses to the supermarkets with their wives. Bosses find most employees are agoraphobes, recoiling from offices where they have to put in a hard day’s work!)

Ironically, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychotherapy, found that his own concoction did not work for him and, therefore, he could not live up to the adage, “Physician, heal thyself”!

He could have everyone on the couch to hear their gripes, but he could not do it for himself. With the result, he was preyed by agoraphobia all his life and he never left his room until Death did them part.

Edgar Allan Poe, the author of mystery novels, and dabbler in poetry, was afraid of closed space, while both Michael Johnson and Joan Crawford spent most of the time washing their hands fearing the onslaught of all sorts of germs and bacteria.

Howard Hughes, an authentic American eccentric, if ever there was one, who combined within himself a number of roles — inventor, investor, aviator, business tycoon, multi-millionaire — also doubled up in entertaining phobias: He was terrified by new places as well as lethal germs.

So, folks, what’s yours? Not column-phobia, I hope!

B. S. RAGHAVAN