Note 184 — LECTURE XIII TWO TYPES OF PHOBIA (Obsessions Continued)

I want to emphasize this point, because certain students, assuming the well-known alleged sexual symbolism as the meaning of steeples and towers, will read and have read such an interpretation into this phobia. As a matter of fact, although these objects had been originally alleged by the subject herself to be the object of the fear it was done thoughtlessly as the result of careless introspection. Later she clearly distinguished the true object. They were no more the object than the churches and schoolhouses themselves. They bore an incidental association only, and only indicated where the ringing of bells might be expected to be heard, having been an element in the original episode. Nor were bells, qua bells, the object of the phobia, but the ringing-of-bells of the kind that recalled the mother’s death. In other words, the fear was of bells with a particular meaning. Nor was the fear absolutely limited to tower-bells, for it transpired that the subject had refrained from having, as she desired, an alarm bell arranged in her house in the country (in case of fire, etc.), because of her phobia. (This note is perhaps made necessary by the violent shaking of the heads of my Freudian friends that I noticed at this point during the presentation of this case before the American Psychopathological Association.) See Jour. Abn. Psychol., Oct.-Nov., 1913.