A FEARFUL PHOBIA

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 24, 23 October 1917, Page 6

A FEARFUL PHOBIA

DREAD OF DUG-OUTS DISPELLED BY DREAM MEMORY. A remarkable ease of claustrophobia— the fear of being in an enclosed spaceis told ia the "Lancet" by Captain WH. R, Rivers, M.D., the patient being doctor who joined the B.A.M.C. early iit the war. All his life he had been afraid', to pass through a tunnel in a train, to travel ia the tube, to sit in a theatre, or be in any place from which it was difficult to get out cjuickly In France his tenor of being m a dug-out, where hei was safe,, was so gTeat that he often: spent a great part of the night walkingabout the trenches, where he was ia danger. Dr. Rivers found that this statsof mind in a man of thirty-four was due to some terrihlo experience undergone as. a child and completely forgotten.

And in fact lie had taken something one day at the age of four to an old rag-and-bone merchant, for which he got' a halfpenny. "Ho had been admitied through a dark, narrow passage. At the end of it was a brown spaniel. Having received his reward, the child came out alone to find the door shut. He was too small to open the door, and the dog at the other end of the passage began to cr'n-l. Th- child was terrified."

This ineidont had vanished completely from his memory, until, a short time ago, when under the care of Dr. Rivers, he dreamed of it. Curiously, it v;as the fact of forgetting this narrow passage inci" dent which had left him a prey to the phobia for nearly thirty years and made i him dread enclosed snaces. As soon as he had recalled it vividly in his dream ths claustrophobia vanished; and he is now quite free from his fear.