TEHRAN – British author Ivan Ward’s book “Phobia” (Ideas in Psychoanalysis) has been published in Persian by the Sib-e Sorkh Publications in Tehran.

The book has been translated into Persian by Morteza Monsef.

People all experience phobias of a mild or severe kind, crystallizing their fears or aversive behavior around a particular object or situation. Certain typical phobias may be regarded as a normal part of childhood - fear of the dark, of wild animals, of intruders. 

Ivan Ward guides the readers through the array of explanations about phobias. The behaviorists see it as a conditioned response to a frightening experience; the genetic explanation sees phobia as the evolutionary legacy of real environmental threats - snakes, spiders, lightning and so on. But the experience of severe phobia also contains something intensely irrational - why such overwhelming anxiety at the sight of a bird’s feather, or the thought of crossing a bridge?

It is around this perplexing core that a psychoanalytic explanation comes into its own. Using common experiences, horror stories, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the cultural history of racism, this book illuminates the nightmare world of phobic phenomena in the individual and in society.

Ward is the director of education at the Freud Museum, London, the series editor of “Ideas in Psychoanalysis” and author of “Introducing Psychoanalysis”.

Photo: Cover of the Persian translation of Ivan Ward’s book “Phobia”.

RM/MMS/YAW