Savory - Arachnida 1977

318 V. HETEROGRAPHIA
this may be added a case, reported to me, of a vertebrate zoologist who
almost always referred to the Arthropoda not by name but as "those
darn' things with legs".
Extreme cases of arachnophobia present a much more serious aspect.
One self-confessed sufferer has written, "I couldn't even write the word
spider. I daren't put my handbag on the floor in case a spider crawled
over it .... I couldn't go into a room until someone had made sure there
were no spiders in it". This last limitation is one of the commonest to be
reported.
The argument for both speed and legginess as causes of arachnophobia
may be taken as established, if not as explained. There is a
further aspect of the problem which should not be omitted. Scorpions
are among the slowest of the arachnids, Solifugae arc certain! y the most
rapid, and yet among native races they are dreaded with equal intcnsities.
The most probable reason for this is inaccurate information
and accepted in childhood. Fragmentary knowledge, derived
from experience, that certain animals are poisonous, ferocious or otherwise
formidable, has been passed on and uncritically transferred to
harmless members of the group, with the general result that has evoked
the whole of this section. It may surely be paralleled by the number of
one's otherwise normal friends \Vho are scared when a wasp flies into
the room, only because one day, long ago, they had been tersely informed
that "wasps sting". It would be most interesting to know the
proportion of arachnophobiacs who could trace their back to a
casual warning in the nursery.
After the realization that all sufferers from phobias can be accurately
described as genuinely ill, both physicians and psychiatrists have sought
for alleviation or cure. Some success has followed the training of patients
in "deep muscular relaxation", which when continued for a number of
sessions produced striking improvements in 90% of the cases treated.
Others have been given an injection which induced a state of relaxation,
during which the patient was encouraged to imagine himself in a series
of increasingly frightening situations and to associate these with a
complete absence of fear. In a good proportion of cases a lasting cure
resulted.
Psychiatrists have tried to explain the ong1n of a phobia and to
rem~ve it by putting their explanations before the sufierer. The simplest
cause is a frightening experience in childhood, and this is a.d~issibl.e
because many other phobias have been to such an ongm. It IS
undeniable tl1at few creatures are more likely than a house spider to
appear unexpectedly and give a shock to a child.
An alternative explanation, which is in keepingwith modern psychoanalysis,
is to relate the phobia to sex. It is here that the contribution of
38. ARACHNOPHOBIA 319
"long hairy is said to be relevant. Hair has a markedly s~xu~l
significance, so that fear and repression of sex may find some rehef m
a~ fear of a hairy object. A spider is doubly unfortunate for the
"hair" is to its legs what the legs are to its body, so that it has but a poor
chance of avoiding its fate as a scapegoat for psychopathetic mentalities.
It may be significant that many people who fear spiders can look, unmoved
and even interested, at harvestrnen, whose conspicuously long
legs are almost smooth.
On the other hand, recognition has lately been given to Tipulophobia,
the exaggerated fear of the familiar daddy-long-legs or crane
fly, an insect whose legs are long but not "hairy". The distinction
~ay perhaps be traced to the insect's body, which is a longish cylinder,
unlike the rotund bodv of a harvestrnan, and so recalls the fear of the
snake, or the tail of a ;at and other cylindrical objects.
But long legs can never be regarded as negligible in this
Everyone has heard of the Cornish prayer
"From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us."
There is, finally, little doubt that the phenomenon ofarachnophobia,
in its true sense, is not a unified one, and that probably each particular
case and each sufferer has its own individual history.