Kate Summerscale

In 2018 a hundred acrophobes were recruited by Oxford University for a randomised experiment. After they had filled out a questionnaire to measure their fear of heights, half were assigned to receive immersive virtual-reality therapy and half to a control group. At six thirty-minute sessions, over about two weeks, the virtual-reality group wore headsets that enabled them to undertake different activities while they navigated ascending floors of a
simulated ten-storey office block. They might rescue a cat from a tree on one floor, play a xylophone near the edge of the next floor, throw balls out of the window on another. In this way, they acquired memories of being secure while high up.

When they answered a questionnaire at the end of the trial, the virtual-reality group reported a reduction in acrophobic symptoms of almost 70 per cent, while the control group’s fear had reduced by less than 4 per cent. When they filled out the questionnaire again two weeks later, more than two-thirds of the people in the virtual-reality group fell below the trial’s fear-of-heights entry criteria: they were no longer acrophobic. ‘The treatment effects produced,’ concluded the study’s authors, ‘were at least as good as – and most likely better – than the best psychological intervention delivered face-to-face with a therapist.’

The fear of water has striking cultural variations. A paper in the Journal of Black Studies in 2011 reported that only a third of Black Americans were confident swimmers, compared to more than two-thirds of whites. In part, the authors argued, this stemmed from a perception of swimming as an expensive, ‘country club’ pursuit, itself a legacy of the racist early twentieth-century policy of banning Black citizens from municipal swimming pools.
Aquaphobia is a circular anxiety, which comes to justify itself: to a person who avoids water, water is genuinely dangerous. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2016 that Black children in the United States were six to ten times more likely to die by drowning than their white peers.

Paul Shepard, an ecologist and philosopher who suggested that spiders had become ‘unconscious proxies for something else … as though they were invented to remind us of something we want to forget, but cannot remember either’. They disturb us because they are found in ‘the cracks that are the zones of separation, or under things, the surfaces between places’. They make us uncomfortable because they are creatures of the in-between.