DeepDyve eBooks - A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear

Introduction

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 1 –18

[The concept of fear includes several semantically-related emotions, such as anxiety, phobias, panic and anguish. Therefore, the first section of this chapter provides a lexical introduction to the concept of fear and cognate words by examining the roots of these terms in the secular Old Greek...

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The Epicurean Concept of Fear and the Road to Ataraxia

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 19 –52

[Epicurus was among the first philosophers to recognise the negative impact of fear upon peace of mind. This chapter argues that the Epicurean state of ataraxia was only to be achieved after a systematic therapy of fear, and above all by fighting the fear of death. Epicurus stressed that it is...

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Roman Fears: Cicero’s and Seneca’s Remedies

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 53 –90

[Cicero’s concept and therapy of fear and distress are mainly conveyed in the Tusculan Disputations, a text with strong Stoic influences. In this work, Cicero’s therapeutic aim is to empower individuals to become their own therapists and to enable them to master their emotions. He argued that...

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Montaigne’s Essays: A Humanistic Approach to Fear

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 91 –123

[Montaigne’s Essays is of major importance for the philosophy of fear. In this work, Montaigne provides narratives of a variety of fears, and in doing so describes a full palette of fear-related emotions, from individual doubts and avoidance, to terror and generalised panic. Montaigne’s analysis...

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Thomas Hobbes and Fear: The Political Use of a Human Emotion

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 125 –155

[Hobbes’s Leviathan is among the first philosophical texts to provide a systematic argument concerning the crucial role of fear in shaping social institutions, and to examine how this emotion may be manipulated for social control. Hobbes’s political ‘remedy’ for social chaos is the establishment...

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Descartes and the Mechanization of Fear

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 157 –190

[The Passions of the Soul is Descartes’s main treatise on the passions (or what are currently more usually referred to as the emotions), in which the philosopher willingly investigates the passions from the perspective of a physiologist rather than a philosopher. Conceptually, Descartes’s...

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James’s Fears and Wittgenstein’s Therapy

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 191 –230

[Williams James suggested that the emotions result from the subject’s perception of somatic changes, thus implying that fear does not depend on an appraisal of danger, being instead the result of a complex neuronal reflex. James’s theory was the departure point for the current neurobiological...

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Sigmund Freud and the Psychoanalytical Concept of Fear and Anxiety

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 231 –257

[A major shift in the concept of fear occurred in 1895 when Sigmund Freud separated out from the syndrome of ‘neurasthenia’ a specific entity he termed ‘Neurosis Anxiety.’ This conceptual demarcation had major consequences for the nosology of fear and anxiety. Most importantly, Freud’s...

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The Medicalization and Social Construction of Fear in the Age of Anxiety

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 259 –287

[This chapter describes the process of medicalization of fear and anxiety which began in the early twentieth century and continues today. The radical biological approach to fear and anxiety promoted by contemporary psychiatry results in a fundamentalist approach to emotional disorders. Thus,...

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Conclusions

Starkstein, Sergio

Pages: 289 –293

[The dominant contemporary concept of fear navigates between the Scylla of biological psychiatry and the Charybdis of social construction. It is paradoxical that after all the attention in the neural and social sciences to fear in the last century, we are often seen to be living in an age of...

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A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear

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A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear

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