Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 36:2 (Winter 1974)
Article: Guidelines From II Timothy For Counseling People With Fears
Author: John F. Bettler

WTJ 36:2 (Winter 1974) p. 198

Guidelines From II Timothy For Counseling People With Fears

John F. Bettler

The Christian counselor often encounters people who have the problem of specific fear. The files of counselors record cases involving fears of driving at night, hospitals, crossing bridges, flying, death and many others. Although some fears are easily adjusted to and may not require counseling, many are so inhibiting as to present obstacles to functioning in a Biblical manner and encourage compensating behavior that is decidedly unchristian. An example is Gloria, a Christian woman of twenty-three and recently married. Since a bad childhood experience while a patient at a hospital she has experienced a fear of hospitals that borders on panic. For years she rationalized her fear by judging all doctors as incompetent quacks and hospitals as refuges for the weak and lazy. Whenever a doctor was contacted by her family she demonstrated overt hostility towards him and refused to cooperate. She contacted a counselor when she realized that her fear threatened her marriage. She and her husband wanted children desperately and that meant hospitalization. Clearly she could no longer avoid handling the fear but had to face it directly if she were to function as a Christian wife.

How would a counselor help Gloria and others to handle fear? Traditional counseling of phobia takes one of two approaches: the dynamic or the behaviorist. The dynamic counselor is less concerned about the immediate, problem of fear than the underlying causes or dynamics of the problem. The fear is seen as symptomatic of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, problem. For example, in his Lectures on Psycho-Analysis Freud contends that all anxiety “… arises from libido that has become unusable for some reason … .”1 A young child is sexually

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attracted to his mother. Anxiety develops when he experiences his father as a threat to that relationship. He is afraid that his father might punish him by castration and, therefore, represses his sexual desire for his mother. Later, the fear of castration is given an up-to-date form attaching itself to some other object like hospitals where the castration might be effected. Although woman cannot have a fear of castration, Freud maintains that they do have a castration complex and fear the loss of a mother’s love.2

The psycho-analyst would view Gloria’s fear of doctors and hospitals as an expression of an initial fear of her father long since repressed. He would attempt to create a climate in which Gloria would experience the therapist as the father, but a nonthreatening father who would not deprive her...