Claustrophobia

To England's Winston Green Gaol for 14 days lately went one Thomas Parker an unemployed ex-Guardsman. It was his first jail sentence, received for sleeping on the highway. On the second night of his imprisonment Parker began to shout that he must get out of jail, even if it meant getting into a coffin. Next morning at exercise he fell into a frenzy. Brought before the prison's acting governor, he was sentenced to three days in solitary confinement. As two guards led him toward the silence cell, he struggled frantically fell injured himself. Fifteen minutes later he was dead. The prison physician affirmed that "the prisoner was a healthy man of average intelligence and sound mind." But Brigadier-General Edward Louis Spears, husband of U.S.-born Novelist Mary Borden, spoke he shocked opinion of many an Englishman when he uprose in Parliament to berate the prison governor. General Spears declared that Thomas Parker had unquestionably suffered from claustrophobia, the ear of confined places. Claustrophobia is a fact. Author James Branch Cabell says he cannot write unless e sits facing an open door. Many another person can testify that human beings do eel anything from a mild uneasiness to a frantic, sickening urge to escape when cooped up in a room, train, subway, elevator, cave, tunnel. Stirred by the Parker case, Britishers testified in letters to the London Times. Wrote Editor F. P. Carroll of The Hospital: "With a third-class purse, I have to travel first-class on the Southern Railway because otherwise I should be caught constantly in the middle of a closely-packed carriage. More than once, when travelling 'third' I have had to tight my way out, in a condition approaching frenzy. ..." When the student leaves the indubitable tact of claustrophobia's existence and begins to look for cause & cure, he finds himself adrift in theory. In a letter to the Times, Dr. Harry Campbell, veteran British neurologist, spoke for the older school when he declared that claustrophobia is simply the morbid expression of a universal animal instinct to avoid capture. Dr. W. Stephenson, University of London psychologist, tartly retorted through the Times that Dr. Campbell's theory was 'very inadequate. . . . Much more satisfactory is ... the current psychoanalytical theory." Psychoanalysis holds, roughly, that morbid fear is the result of a distressing experience in early life, later repressed into the Unconscious (i. e. forgotten). Relief is obtained when the sufferer, by recalling that experience, brings his 'ailment out of the shadows into the light of consciousness. A classic case is that described by the late Dr. W. H. H. Rivers, who succeeded in curing a young man stricken with claustrophobia in World War trenches by getting him to recall a childhood terror connected with a long passageway and a dog. Psychiatrists (including psychoanalysts) commonly supplement-- recall with their science's standard instruments: suggestion, persuasion, analysis, rationalization. Claustrophobes who have tried to reason with their unreasoning fears, will appreciate the Times letter of one V. G. T.: "May I take this opportunity of saying something that I think may help other sufferers? I have suffered from claustrophobia for 28 years; that is about as far back as I can remember. As a child at school, before it had any name for me but was just something dreadful belonging to me, I used to fix my attention on some chink in the window with a concentration that would have surprised my teachers who found it so lacking in all my studies' I have had the frenzy that Mr. F. P. Carroll speaks of in every imaginable place, from a hotel bathroom to St Peter's in Rome. It has spoilt, or lost to me for good, most of the things in life I have wanted. I have tried various cures psychological and otherwise, which have cost a great deal and done me no good But latterly I have found something that does help, and that is just talking about it. ''This is not so easy as it sounds For one thing, part of the complex is that one finds it almost impossible to talk about it and this is encouraged by doctors and other advisers, who say 'banish it from your mind,' 'forget it,' and all that nonsense. One can banish everything else from one's mind, including the doctors and advisers, but not that. But I have found that to talk about it when it comes on is a help; instead of instinctively bottling it up, to let it go on whoever happens to be nearest who will listen. It may be borin? for them, but it is not more so than nine out of ten of the things that people talk about. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.