Anxiety and Fear in Society and My Life

Fear can be an extraordinarily helpful emotion. For example, a toddler I loved learned to fear a hot stove whose protective plate had just fallen off, which resulted in a frightening bad burn and a trip to the emergency room. In his mind, “Hot” represented danger, a healthy fear, so he would avoid touching it in the future. Fear can protect us from peril. However, fear can also result in incapacitating anxiety, which can become intolerable for some people, leading to them embracing what they fear most, and in extreme cases, suicide. Below, I will show how fear impacts our society and the world, then probe some aspects of fear in my own life and how I adapted over time.

Fear in Society

In the course of my extensive education in history, political science, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory, it has become my conviction that fear plays an enormous role in our male-dominated world, which is one reason why I’m encouraged by the increasing number of women in business, government, and society. In my experience, women are quicker than men to process their fears by talking about them. Men, more than women, deal with their fears through denial and self-aggrandizement. By feeling strong, or at least identifying with leaders they see as strong, male fears are toned down. As a presidential psychobiographer, I’ve been struggling with the different approaches to anxiety and fear regarding the public’s reaction to Presidents Trump and Biden. We are living in extraordinarily anxious times, not simply because of the COVID-19 PLAGUE and some decline in life span as a result of it, but be-

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cause modern electronic media has endlessly brought the fears and problems of the world to our eyes and ears.

Fear abounds in modern society, which in so many ways is the safest in history despite our environmental crisis and limited ability to control our aggressive self-destructive inclinations in this nuclear world. In ordinary life, people objectively now have fewer reasons to fear than perhaps at any other time in the history of homo sapiens. When our ancestors looked out of their cave or the precarious safety of their treetop perch to determine if there was an animal or human danger in the North, East, West, or South (the NEWS), their fear was predicated more on the threat to survival than ours are today. Their lives were incredibly shorter and generally less healthy than ours: White men born in 1900 lived to be about 47, and White men born in 2000 are expected to live to be about 75. White women lived to be 49 when born in 1900 and are expected to live until they’re 80 when born in 2000 (Stanley, 2022). The improvement for Black Americans is much more dramatic. Black women born in 1900 lived to be about 34 and in 2000 are expected to live to be about 74, while Black men born in 1900 lived to be about 33 and in 2000 are expected to live to be about 68 (Stanley, 2022). While we live in a much safer and healthier society, reasons to fear are before our eyes far more because the NEWS generally stresses the dangers of our world, both real and imagined. Since we are geared by our history to look for danger, and the self-interest of the NEWS is to get our eyeballs on their screens and papers, we are permeated by bad NEWS. The 24-7 news coverage on TV and all screens has exponentially increased what people “should be” afraid of. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, and the primary message of screens seems to be escapism and FEAR FEAR FEAR. Fear sells.

While our global society may be, in so many ways, the safest and most prosperous in human existence, it also breeds extreme anxiety. The fears of our cavepeople ancestors were more concrete: Were they going to be killed by a powerful animal or another family tribe? Would they have enough to eat? Access to three meals a day and having food from around the world at your disposal is a pretty recent phenomenon. Our fears are multitudinous and diffused because they are connected to so much more than just the dangers of starvation, falling out of our tree, getting killed, or being made subservient to another human group. I discovered in dieting and in researching the Holocaust that our bodies have a mechanism

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based upon the often starving history of our ancestors, which enables us to survive very long periods without adequate food. Today, there is reason to be concerned with the starving children in Somalia and the suffering of Ukrainians as they are bombed rather than with whether we ourselves will have enough to eat and survive today. The implications of this situation are countless.

Wherever I turn for information, I see reasons to fear. So much of our entertainment is even based upon controlling the terror, fright, fearfulness, horror, alarm, panic, agitation, trepidation, dread, consternation, dismay, distress, anxiety, worry, and angst, we experience in the face of threats to our existence, that is, death. We can repress our fear of dying by using euphemisms for death such as “pass on,” “meet their maker,” “pass away,” or “depart.” The other day I found 362 ways of describing death or dying without using either of these words. My wife loves to read and watch murder mysteries, provided there’s no gore. Horror on TV and in books inclines to bring the gore front and center. Many famous action heroes kill the “bad guys” as easily as people shoot ducks or other targets in an amusement park to win a prize. Then there is the entertainment “news” that we watch every morning with lots of weather alerts. I’m old enough to remember when the morning news was much more about news and far less about entertaining. In recent years, the “hard” news component has declined as TV executives are keen to maintain the ratings of their programs so that they can keep their jobs and earn bonuses. This also means that the worry and fear component is decreased. For more serious and worrisome news, I turn to PBS NewsHour, CNN, and British Broadcasting, then I check out what’s on Fox News and other channels. Of course, many of us live in separate echo chambers corresponding to the politics we prefer. These echo chambers often become like separate enemy camps, which leads me to fear for our American democracy.

In his fine chapter, “Anxiety and History,” Peter Loewenberg (1995) writes that “anxiety is the most pervasive presenting complaint in the modern world” (p. 155). This distinguished psychological historian discusses Freud’s changing perspectives on anxiety and highlights the role of effective leadership, such as FDR’s calming the country during the Great Depression by declaring that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” (p. 155). Professor Loewenberg also emphasizes the importance of hopelessness in engendering fear

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in the face of threats, most especially when faith in government authority is diminished, as it is presently. With the problems of a world filled with eight million people brought to our doorsteps, indeed, to our eyes, by the internationalized mass media, our helplessness in the face of such need increases our anxiety. Of course, other elements can also engender fear or create an escape from it, for example, nostalgia for a real or imagined past.

Nostalgia has a component of fear. It’s about the fear of losing fond memories, which are idealized in the process. On 60 Minutes, Ted Koppel, the veteran newscaster who rose to prominence during the Iran Hostage Crisis, went to Mt. Airy, North Carolina, which was the fictional town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), in 2021. He interviewed numerous people who came from around the country on nostalgia trips to this imaginary, wonderfully friendly, almost pure White southern community in which good-natured Sheriff Andy (Andy Griffith) lived with his extremely cute son Opie (Ron Howard). On the tour bus, almost all of the very pleasant elderly visitors believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and downplayed the January 6^th attack on the Capitol. Nostalgia is an extremely powerful force, especially today when politics are often dominated by Culture War issues rather than the economic and political realities of the day.

While I write primarily from a U.S. perspective, I took a doctoral degree in European history and work to go beyond my American perspective. For example, the Soviet Union, which had been held together by fear of murderous leaders who were in control and the belief that the outside world was a mortal threat, collapsed when Gorbachev failed to use force to keep the Eastern European satellite countries in line and said that the West was more a model of future development rather a mortal threat to the communist system. Reforming societies invoke great hopes as well as fears, sometimes leading to the destruction of the system being reformed. Reform greatly disrupts the status quo and may bring about radicalism among those whose high hopes are dashed, such as was the backdrop of the assassination of the “Czar Liberator” Alexander II in 1881. Both group and individual change can be frightening to the point of terror!

Fear in My Life

Fortunately, anxiety and fear have diminished in my own life, which has benefitted from a long psychoanalysis, a satisfying career, and a successful marriage. My guess is that I felt fear even

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in utero. I was labeled a premature baby and kept in the hospital for several weeks; my Mom visited with breastmilk. I have strong reasons to believe that my first few years were spent at my immigrant grandmother’s house under her care and that of my aunt Mollie—a woman vacillating between being extraordinarily giving and bitterly claiming that you owed her—who claimed to have raised my two older siblings and me. While I cannot identify many specific fears that I had from about the ages of three to six when I remember living over my father’s store in a dangerous neighborhood, I’m sure there were many. Our apartment was burgled, rats running on the metal ceiling terrorized me, my sister was sexually abused, and a mother and daughter who cared for us for an unknown period of months were presented to us children as “bad people” after they were fired abruptly.

As a young boy, it was my loneliness, longing for companionship, and guilt that stood out rather than fear itself. While my older brother and sister were off at school, I was either underfoot in the workshop below or above the store being told not to “bang on the pipe,” which was my signal to my Mom that I was sick. Of course, how does a small boy know the difference between being sick and so sick of being lonely that he needs his mom? Hurting myself led to emergency room trips and stitches. In longing for a playmate who lived in a house behind our apartment, in our backyard loaded with dangerous refuse from the diner alongside “Dad’s store,” where I got hung up on the picket fence; it had taken quite a lot of yelling before my father came out to save me. I still bear a scar by my Adam’s apple and another the length of my left forearm from a jagged tin can.

Dad loved to brag about saving my life on a variety of occasions, the most serious of which was an undiagnosed ruptured appendix that he reported I had for three-and-a-half days (while basically a very honest man, my father certainly was inclined to exaggerate at times, as when he said I weighed three-and-a-half pounds at birth and the hospital record said five-and-a-quarter pounds. My near-death experience followed all three of us children having had our tonsils removed prophylactically and my simply not getting better until it became apparent that I was at death’s door. The only emotion I remember from the period was embarrassment at having my temperature taken rectally during the unusual visit of my tearful grandmother and aunt. At that point, Dad called a cab and took me to the hospital, saying maybe the doctors there can save my life,

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which they did. Now for the first time, I wonder if my Dad’s distrust of doctors was based partly on the failure of the too-well-trusted family doctor, who did house calls as a matter of course, to say “take him to the hospital.”

Denial of pain started early in my life. I remember not having any pain while recuperating in the hospital and then at a caring woman’s house during the early stages of my recuperation. Rather than pain, I remember Aunt Mollie bringing me a treat of ice cream in the hospital and feeling mortified and fearful at having wet my bed on the first evening of my recuperation when I was released from the hospital as I carried my soiled sheets down the stairs. Thankfully and surprisingly, I was greeted with concern, warmth, and made to feel that whatever I did was okay because I was loved, even by this new motherly woman in my life.

There are several instances of intense fear from the first decade of my life that I remember: At about four or five I was terrorized by what was either a nightmare or a waking dream. Not knowing if I were awake or asleep was an important aspect of the terror. Mom was able to calm me by depicting a totally safe world using the image of a village within a Lionel train set. When I was five or six, my angry father chased my older brother, threatening to beat him with a strap in the woodshed, and I was determined that I would never face his anger. At about age eight, we three children were playing hide and seek in the dark when a lovely glass pole lamp was broken, probably by me, and we dreaded the return of our parents. Two of the consequences of these early experiences with fear were an inclination to search for perfectly contained solutions to my and society’s problems and a determination to be a “good boy” who was proud that his father never hit him. At about the age of ten, I was terrorized by numerous nightmares as a result of having gone to see The Phantom of the Opera movie with a friend. Throughout my pre-high school life in the schoolyard, I feared the bullies, especially around Easter, who abused me for being Jewish and was slow to defend myself.

The fears I remember most have to do with achievement: Throughout my almost entire life, I saw myself as rather slow, which would become an incentive for constantly pushing myself to learn more and probe new ways of knowing. I feared that I might not measure up in the Army (which I denigrated) or as a teacher (which I idealized, especially because it was my Mom’s deathbed wish that I become a professor). Driven by a great quest for

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knowledge, an intense fear of failure, and a drive for success (since I soon had three children and a wife depending on me), I kept searching for new modes of knowing, which is what brought me to many forms of self-help, a lengthy psychoanalysis, and psychohistory.

Growing up, as was commonplace among males in my generation, I would take pride in the denial of both fear and pain and taught myself to only pay attention to injuries if they were extremely painful or if I was bleeding profusely. In fact, despite a long psychoanalysis, which helped me to connect more closely with my body, I still upset my wife if I have what I consider a minor bump on my head, arms, or legs and there’s some blood that I hadn’t noticed as I went about getting the jobs done I had set for myself. Clearly, I suppressed and repressed my fears. I’ve just retired from teaching after a long career because I need to be more present for my wife, who struggles with Parkinson’s disease, bad arthritis, and very bad knees and is recuperating from a broken hip. So now, aside from anxiety about her health, she recently observed that my greatest fear is that I will lose my greatly valued sense of identity as a professor. In response, I created a new email account: .

Fear Reduced by Love, Work, Psychoanalysis, and the Life of the Mind

While fear can be a useful warning of the real dangers in our world, in the U.S. Culture Wars, realistic fears are mostly belittled by our male-dominated politics. Meanwhile, humans are predisposed to look for dangers, which is fueled by our 24/7 news coverage. There is definite anxiety in my life about my wife’s illness, specifically what retirement and then old age will bring for both of us. Yet the love of our family, the work I do in caring for her, and my editing, leadership, and scholarship remain the satisfying cornerstones of my life. Personal and psychohistorical activities (e.g., caregiving, convening psychohistory, editing, researching, writing articles and books, etc.), which are more within my control to turn toward, are creative and productive ways of lessening my anxiety about our deteriorating environment and the threat to our democracy. I find myself less anxious and fearful than I was as a child and young man when I struggled to find my identity.

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