Just listen to all the things which may become the objects of contents of a phobia: Darkness, open air, open squares, cats, spiders, caterpillars, snakes, mice, thunderstorms, sharp points, blood, enclosed spaces, crowds, solitude, passing over a bridge, travel on land and sea.” (A General Introduction ..., 344)

There are too many phobias. This variety, the extraordinary variety of possible contents, clearly shows that phobias cannot be explained by their objects. The reason for the fear, the mechanism of phobias, is not in the objects.

Or, at least, Freud distinguishes in his lectures three groups of phobias. Phobias of the first group are indeed in relation to a danger, a snake for instance, though the reaction of the subject is then exaggerated. The subject here heightens a universal human antipathy. The second group of phobias still bears a relation to danger but we are used to accommodating this kind of danger. The railroad phobia belongs to this second kind:

We know that by taking a railroad journey we entail greater chance of disaster than by staying at home. A collision, for instance, may occur, or a ship sink, when as a rule we must drown; yet we do not think of these dangers, and free from fear we travel on train and boat. (345)

Then there are phobias which bear no relation to danger. This third group of phobias is “entirely unintelligible to us” (345). It “confronts us with an enigma” (346). Freud mentions agoraphobia, a strong and healthy man who cannot cross a square in his home town, and animal phobia, a woman who cannot bear a cat coming close to her.

It is again Pascal's problem. Intelligence, reason (and philosophy, for that matter) cannot understand phobia, nor fight against the fear. There is nothing scary in a mouse. It may even be used as a pet name for a lover, or for a child: “my little mouse.” Still, when I see a mouse, I scream. It is below our intelligence that something happens which triggers fear, something that our intelligence cannot reach nor fight against. All the authors that we have studied agree on this. Even Descartes points to the source of these “strange aversions” in the brain, which remain impressed by the accidental connections that were wired during childhood. The brain must be rewired through a specific training before we can use our reason to dominate our passions. James evokes an autonomous mechanism in the body that must be put back in place through breathing, for instance, or exercise. Woody Allen would use jokes so as to express his fear and belittle the fearsome object. But, of course, one does not make jokes using only one's intelligence and reason. Nor does one tell stories. With Bachelard, it seems that the way out of a phobia is to train one's imagination so as to be able to fight in imagination all kinds of beasts, and survive in all possible environments. It is the labors of Hercules that we must redo, in imagination, endlessly retelling ourselves stories of taming beast and flying in storms where fire, and water, and earth mix with the air in canny proportions.

Freud goes in yet another direction. Freud intends to understand the real source of the fear. The problem is to “[re-]establish the relation to danger that obviously exists under the phobia.” There is danger but the danger is not in the apparent object of the phobia. The problem is to find where the danger is. And for that, one cannot use one's intelligence. Phobias are opaque to intelligence. There are like dreams and must be analyzed as a dream, submitted to the same kind of interpretation:

I may now say that you realize how insufficient it would be to explain only their content, to be interested only in knowing that this or that object or situation is made the subject of a phobia. The content of the phobia has about the same importance for it as the manifest dream facade has for the dream. (355)

That is why there is no point in dwelling on the hellish train station. With Bachelard, we would have tried, in imagination, to learn and live in these hellish fires, and take pleasure in that, tell stories with happy endings. But, for Freud's analysis, it would be counterproductive. The phobia must be reinterpreted: hell, punishment, father. The perceived danger is in the unperceived father. Let us talk about your father. The world of the phobia, the extra-ordinary character of the phobic object is lost. It collapses like a dream.