Phobia

Sian Morgan is a psychoanalytic therapist and a member of the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy, where for over twenty-five years, she has been practicing as a therapist and supervisor. She was Director of Studies for the Post-Graduate Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Cambridge for fifteen years.

This book should illuminate why psychoanalysis has been under-used in the treatment of phobia-is it simply that other treatments are more successful or is it a symptom of today's "quick fix" culture? By considering the origins and meanings of phobia from such a wide range of viewpoints, it may be possible to formulate new approaches to the therapeutic treatment of phobia and re-engage the interests of the psychoanalytic community in this fascinating subject.'In recent years research, theorization, and the treatment of phobias have been dominated by biological and psychopharmacological approaches, and by cognitive-behavioural therapies. Writings on phobia have diminished in the field of psychoanalysis. This book is an attempt to redress the balance and focuses not on treatment but on the origin and meaning of phobia. This collection, then, concentrates on the personal, mythological and cultural meanings of phobia and its origins' - Sian Morgan, from her Introduction.

• Foreword -- Introduction -- Phobia: a biological perspective -- High anxiety: a Jungian analysis of phobia -- Phobic anxiety: learning from clinical experience and psychoanalytic observations of children -- Phobia and object relations theory -- Phobia as a quest for fantasy -- Phobias and primitive psychotic anxieties -- Fathers and phobias: a possibly psychoanalytic point of view -- The history of a phobia: an overview of the development of ideas on the origins and meaning of agoraphobia