Boo!

ARE YOU terrified of rabbits

Do you fear the setting sun?

Do you dream of mammoth spiders?

Do crowds leave you unstrung?

If you have a secret phobia,

Do not so soon despair,

Our Useless Fears by Joseph Wolpe

Will soothe your every care.

An expert in his field,

Wolpe explains his every trick.

In a tone of cold authority,

He reveals what makes you tick.

And if, by chance, you wonder what

This book has done for you,

Don't argue now; the trip was free:

You've seen the human zoo!

JOSEPH WOLPE, author of Our Useless Fears, sets himself a lofty goal. You would never know it from the cover: the inch-high purple letters hailing "the world's foremost authority on anxiety" immediately remind one of the rash of self-help books so abundant during the last few years. But in opening paragraph of his preface, Wolpe assures us that his book is not of that genre, revealing his true motive in a voice filled with profound eloquence: "These offshoots of behavior therapy are like the uppermost branches of a tree, visible above a mist." He expounds further: "The trunk and lower branches remain hidden from view: no clear, easily accessible, and authoritative description has been available to the public. This book is an attempt to provide that full picture, to reveal the tree and all its branches."

This "tree" is a controversial theory of psychiatric therapy which the doctor helped found over the last 40 years. Fear, the author contends, is a learned response to pain, and when it is directly aroused in a given setting, things that are present at the time--sights, sounds or feelings--may also become fear-related. These newly feared things may also act as "carriers," spreading the anxiety to still other aspects of the environment. Wolpe gives the example of a woman with a fear of crowds who would go to the movies only in the daytime when few people were present. One afternoon the cinema suddenly filled with students, sending her into a panic. After that she was afraid, not only of crowds, but of theatres, restaurants and churches--of any public building, even when it was empty. She can't have had many friends.

To overcome such "useless fears," Wolpe advocates a method called "systematic desensitization" or, less technically, "graduated calming." The essense of the procedure is to have a deeply relaxed patient imagine a slightly fearful object of situation for a few seconds at a time. With each repetition, the amoung of fear lessens, finally dropping to zero. Then successively more fearful images are treated in the same way, until even the most fearful lose their fear-arousing power.

Sound simple enough? Wolpe is not always so sure. "For many years I firmly resisted the idea of writing a popularly comprehensive book," Wolpe writes, "for I felt myself firmly committed to scientific work." However, having at long last decided to produce the definitive work of poppsychology, the author goes to great lengths to clarify his theories. He begins by defining a useless fear; "If walking through a park, I come upon a snarling tiger, the fear is appropriate because there is a real danger. But if, instead of a tiger, I see a small mouse and am terrified by that harmless creature, the fear is useless." For readers who have no difficulty understanding this formidable concept, Wolpe goes on to define emotion, imagination and habit. With the exception of "systematic desensitization," the author shuns words over two syllables long, and those few staples which he cannot absolutely avoid--anxiety and inhibition, for instance--he italicizes for emphasis. Got it!?

This tone of pedantic tolerance oozes from the book. Although billing the volume as a scholarly treatment, Wolpe does not rely on his theories to retain the reader's interest. Nearly everyone has some needless anxiety--a fear of heights or of strangers, of small dogs or public speaking. But Wolpe ignores these more common fears, packing his chapters instead with a parade of human oddities which belong in psychiatric journals or future editions of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. We meet Dale, a 33-year-old man who is deeply upset each day by the late afternoon sun. There is Tim, a boy of three who won't eat in the presence of fur, fuzz or feathers. And there is the young man so traumatized by an incestual experience of his youth he "spent most of his waking hours in elaborate rituals of bathing." This is the stuff of grade B movies. It is also the stuff on which Wolpe comes to rely.

Masquerading as a self-help book, and claiming to be a scientific treatise, Our Useless Fears is more like a guided tour of the San Diego zoo. The human menagerie paraded across its pages might benefit from Dr. Wolpe's theories; but for the average reader--neither traumatized by sunrise nor terrified by frogs--the book is as useless as the fears it describes.