Cultural Event Blog: Phobia

In order to write my cultural blog for this week I attended the lecture titled "American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear" by Sean Quimby, Syracuse University Library's director for Special Collection Research. I felt that the lecture tended to be a little uneventful because of the fact that there seemed to be no thesis or argument to the lecture. The lecture was much more devoted to presenting some of the famous historical documents associated with fear that can be found in Syracuse University's Special Collection Research Center. Some titles that were mentioned include "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" by Charles Darwin and "America's Retreat From Victory" by the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy. The lecture did not provide much information on different types of phobias or how they began as I had originally expected it would. However, it did provide a discussion on what Mr. Quimby noted as the two trends in the evolution of fear in America. He referred to these two trends as "the dogged invasion of fantasy" and the "gradual emergence of a therapeutic culture" in American history. The idea of a "dogged invasion of fantasy" was backed up by showing evidence of the fears that Americans had/have of things considered to be objects of fantasy. This can be seen in the public's reaction to the event when Orsen Welles read H.G. Wells' popular book "The War of the World's" on the radio. Quimby also showed how ideas of phobia and fantasy can be seen more and more throughout popular writings as the genre of Science Fiction novels seemed to reach its height in the United States. The "gradual emergence of a therapeutic culture" can be seen throughout the discussions of people dating back to colonial times where it became more and more socially acceptable to speak of the ideas of fear.