The fear of trains is anxiety and fear associated with trains, railways, and railway travel.
The fear of trains is anxiety and fear associated with trains, railways, and railway travel.
Psychonalysts, starting from Sigmund Freud, associated sensations towards travel by train with sexuality. In 1906, Freud wrote that the link between railway travel and sexuality derives from the pleasurable sensation of shaking during the travel. Therefore, in the event of repression of sexuality the person will experience anxiety when confronted with railway travel. [1] [2] Karl Abraham interpreted the fear of the uncontrollable motion of a train as a projection of the fear of uncontrolled sexuality. [2] Wilhelm Stekel (1908) also associated train phobia with rocking sensation, but in addition to libido repression, he associated it with the embarrassment with the reminiscences of the rocking sensation of the early childhood. [1]
Freud himself was suffering a kind of train anxiety, as he confessed in a number of letters. [3] He used the term "Reiseangst" for it, which literally means "fear of travel" but it was recognized it was primarily associated with the travel by train, [4] and some translators translated Freud's "Reiseangst" as "railroad phobia" [3] However Freud's anxiety was not classified as a "true" phobia, since once the travel started, the anxiety disappeared, and in fact, Freud traveled much and liked it. [4]
Regardless of sexuality, since early days various authors associated the uncontrollable movement of the train with the fear of derailment, or a catastrophe. [2]
Another source of fear in the early days of railway travel was travelers' isolation from the outside world, as well as the confinement in a small compartment, rendering a person who became sick or subject to crime, helpless. "...The loudest screams are swallowed up by the roar of the rapidly revolving wheels...". [5] This kind of fear, as well as actual crimes committed in trains, were often a matter of newspaper publications of the times. [6] After a number of prominent cases this fear was elevated to the level of collective psychosis. [7] Public fear about rail travel was heightened after British surgeon John Eric Erichsen described a post-traumatic diagnosis known as railway spine or "Erichsen's disease". People diagnosed with this had no obvious injury and were rejected as fake. Nowadays it is known that traffic accidents may cause post-traumatic stress disorder. [8]
It has been variously called "train phobia", "railroad phobia", "dread of railway travel", etc. The German term "Eisenbahnangst" used, e.g., by Sigmund Freud [1] was literally converted into Greek as "siderodromophobia" (Eisen = sideron = iron, Bahn = dromos = way, Angst = phobos = fear). [9] In cases when this anxiety exceeds the social norms of a realistic fear, this anxiety may be classified as a specific phobia about trains. [10] Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary puts the fear of trains under the "vehicle phobia", together with fears of boats, airplanes, automobiles, and other forms of transportation. [11]
A 1913 short story Terror by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is a first-person narrative of a young man suffering of the morbid fear of travel in trains and streetcars. Tanizaki uses the German word Eisenbahnkrankheit, "railroad sickness". [12]
Other travel-related anxieties include:
Other transport-related disorders include:
A phobia is an anxiety disorder, defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. Phobias typically result in a rapid onset of fear and are usually present for more than six months. Those affected go to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the object or situation cannot be avoided, they experience significant distress. Other symptoms can include fainting, which may occur in blood or injury phobia, and panic attacks, often found in agoraphobia and emetophobia. Around 75% of those with phobias have multiple phobias.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Neurosis is a term mainly used today by followers of Freudian thinking to describe mental disorders caused by past anxiety, often that has been repressed. In recent history, the term has been used to refer to anxiety-related conditions more generally.
Anxiety disorders are a cluster of mental disorders characterized by significant and uncontrollable feelings of anxiety and fear such that a person's social, occupational, and personal function are significantly impaired. Anxiety may cause physical and cognitive symptoms, such as restlessness, irritability, easy fatiguability, difficulty concentrating, increased heart rate, chest pain, abdominal pain, and a variety of other symptoms that may vary based on the individual.
Panic attacks are sudden periods of intense fear and discomfort that may include palpitations, sweating, chest pain or chest discomfort, shortness of breath, trembling, dizziness, numbness, confusion, or a feeling of impending doom or of losing control. Typically, symptoms reach a peak within ten minutes of onset, and last for roughly 30 minutes, but the duration can vary from seconds to hours. Although they can be extremely frightening and distressing, panic attacks themselves are not physically dangerous.
Emetophobia is a phobia that causes overwhelming, intense anxiety pertaining to vomit. This specific phobia can also include subcategories of what causes the anxiety, including a fear of vomiting or seeing others vomit. Emetephobes might also avoid the mentions of "barfing", vomiting, "throwing up", or "puking."
In psychology, displacement is an unconscious defence mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object for things felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable.
In Freudian Ego psychology, psychosexual development is a central element of the psychoanalytic sexual drive theory. Freud believed that personality developed through a series of childhood stages in which pleasure seeking energies from the child became focused on certain erogenous areas. An erogenous zone is characterized as an area of the body that is particularly sensitive to stimulation. The five psychosexual stages are the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital. The erogenous zone associated with each stage serves as a source of pleasure. Being unsatisfied at any particular stage can result in fixation. On the other hand, being satisfied can result in a healthy personality. Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced frustration at any of the psychosexual developmental stages, they would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder.
Railway spine was a nineteenth-century diagnosis for the post-traumatic symptoms of passengers involved in railroad accidents.
Wilhelm Stekel was an Austrian physician and psychologist, who became one of Sigmund Freud's earliest followers, and was once described as "Freud's most distinguished pupil". According to Ernest Jones, "Stekel may be accorded the honour, together with Freud, of having founded the first psycho-analytic society.". However, a phrase used by Freud in a letter to Stekel, "the Psychological Society founded by you," suggests that the initiative was entirely Stekel's. Jones also wrote of Stekel that he was "a naturally gifted psychologist with an unusual flair for detecting repressed material." Freud and Stekel later had a falling-out, with Freud announcing in November 1912 that "Stekel is going his own way". A letter from Freud to Stekel dated January 1924 indicates that the falling out was on interpersonal rather than theoretical grounds, and that at some point Freud developed a low opinion of his former associate. He wrote: "I...contradict your often repeated assertion that you were rejected by me on account of scientific differences. This sounds quite good in public but it doesn't correspond with the truth. It was exclusively your personal qualities - usually described as character and behavior - which made collaboration with you impossible for my friends and myself." Stekel's works are translated and published in many languages.
Herbert Graf was an Austrian-American opera producer. Born in Vienna in 1903, he was the son of Max Graf (1873–1958), and Olga Hönig. His father was an Austrian author, critic, musicologist and member of Sigmund Freud's circle of friends. Herbert Graf was the Little Hans discussed in Freud's 1909 study Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy.
Fear of the dark is a common fear or phobia among children and, to a varying degree, adults. A fear of the dark does not always concern darkness itself; it can also be a fear of possible or imagined dangers concealed by darkness. Some degree of fear of the dark is natural, especially as a phase of child development. Most observers report that fear of the dark seldom appears before the age of two years. When fear of the dark reaches a degree that is severe enough to be considered pathological, it is sometimes called scotophobia, or lygophobia.
Somatization is a tendency to experience and communicate psychological distress as bodily and organic symptoms and to seek medical help for them. More commonly expressed, it is the generation of physical symptoms of a psychiatric condition such as anxiety. The term somatization was introduced by Wilhelm Stekel in 1924.
Phobophobia is a phobia defined as the fear of phobias, or the fear of fear, including intense anxiety and unrealistic and persistent fear of the somatic sensations and the feared phobia ensuing. Phobophobia can also be defined as the fear of phobias or fear of developing a phobia. Phobophobia is related to anxiety disorders and panic attacks directly linked to other types of phobias, such as agoraphobia. When a patient has developed phobophobia, their condition must be diagnosed and treated as part of anxiety disorders.
Scopophobia, scoptophobia, or ophthalmophobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by a morbid fear of being seen in public or stared at by others.
Panic disorder is a mental and behavioral disorder, specifically an anxiety disorder characterized by reoccurring unexpected panic attacks. Panic attacks are sudden periods of intense fear that may include palpitations, sweating, shaking, shortness of breath, numbness, or a feeling that something terrible is going to happen. The maximum degree of symptoms occurs within minutes. There may be ongoing worries about having further attacks and avoidance of places where attacks have occurred in the past.
Chronophobia, also known as prison neurosis, is considered an anxiety disorder describing the fear of time and time moving forward, which is commonly seen in prison inmates. Next to prison inmates, chronophobia is also identified in individuals experiencing quarantine due to COVID-19. As time is understood as a specific concept, chronophobia is categorized as a specific phobia.
Hodophobia is an irrational fear, or phobia, of travel.
Sigmund Freud is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us".
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, hysteria was a common psychiatric diagnosis made primarily in women. The existence and nature of a purported male hysteria was a debated topic around the turn of the century. It was originally believed that men could not suffer from hysteria because of their lack of uterus. This belief was discarded in the 17th century when discourse identified the brain or mind, and not reproductive organs, as the root cause of hysteria. During World War I, hysterical men were diagnosed with shell shock or war neurosis, which later went on to shape modern theories on PTSD. The notion of male hysteria was initially connected to the post-traumatic disorder known as railway spine; later, it became associated with war neurosis.