The Book Of Phobias And Manias

Kate Summerscale Wellcome Collection €21.50

Phobias and manias sit at opposite ends of the same masochistic stick. In her fascinating survey of these contradictory maladies, Kate Summerscale explains that they ‘reveal our inner landscapes – what we recoil from or lurch towards, what we can’t get out of our heads’.

In her selective A to Z, she conjures up a league table of phobias, from the understandable – injections, being buried alive – to the inconceivable: popcorn phobia, say, or cottonwool phobia. People can be spooked by an endless array of things, from clowns, forests and mobile phones to specific noises and smells. It is thought that Steve Jobs suffered from koumpounophobia, a fear of buttons. That’s why he wore polo-necks. And relaxed readers should be mindful of hypophobia: an abnormal lack of fear. Manias, meanwhile, often ‘magnify ordinary desires – the wishes to laugh, light a fire, have sex’. And, as with tulip mania and Beatlemania, they can be collective hysterias. In the 1960s, manic laughter broke out among more than a thousand schoolchildren in Tanzania. Each neurosis is shaded in with curious, ghastly or funny details. Social patterns emerge. For instance, there was a chauvinistic edge to 19thCentury manias: kleptomania was considered the curse of well-heeled ladies, and a woman with a high sex drive could be labelled a nymphomaniac (often by her husband). Summerscale uses the same talent for elaborating on psychological tics that made her non-fiction thriller The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher a bestseller. But it took its toll. ‘When I began researching this book, I did not think of myself as having any particular phobias,’ she writes. ‘By the time I’d finished I had talked myself into almost every one.’