Bio‐phobias/techno‐philias: virtual reality exposure as treatment for phobias of ‘nature’

Abstract

In modern society natural objects like spiders or snakes have a primary role as the loci of specific phobias. Drawing on interviews with members of the UK National Phobics Society (NPS) and associated service providers, this paper explores the implications of the increasingly significant role played by new media, particularly Virtual Reality technologies, in the treatment of these 'bio-phobias'. While advanced technological approaches provide new possibilities for individual sufferers to experiment with and control their phobic responses they also exemplify certain aspects of those specifically modern social relations that are the media within which bio-phobic behaviours develop. From a critical sociological perspective the techno-philic move to the medium of cyber-space may actually exaggerate characteristically modern social relations that seek (but never convincingly manage) to assert complete 'cultural' control over the unpredictable 'natural' elements threatening our cultural integrity.

‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’

“…The abject is associated with that over which we seemingly have no personal or social control, that moves erratically, never stays fixed in vision, makes our skin crawl or darkens our doorsteps, that which escapes the classification that would exclude it altogether from a modern culture systematically cleansed of contaminating natural elements. Unfortunately, then, in Bordo's terms, these phobias might indeed crystallize something seriously wrong with modernity's cultural 'It Makes My Skin Crawl' ■ 63 environmental ills of the larger social body may itself be due to precisely this controlling ethos (see Davidson and Smith, 2003, for an extensive discussion of this issue).…”

“…The cultural logic of modernity is based, perhaps above all else, on a distinction between nature and culture, and on the attempt to control and commodify the former in the service of the latter (Davidson and Smith, 2003). The kinds of concretized and citified lifestyles we are ever more likely to lead foster unreasonable beliefs about the extent to which we can control the nonhuman environment.…”

“…Such issues, coupled with the fact that almost all specific phobias are associated directly or indirectly with natural objects (Davidson and Smith, 2003), such as those listed above, leaves the field open to those who proffer naturalistic and/or psychological explanations. As de Jong and Muris state: '[v]irtually all recent psychology textbooks explain the etiology of spider phobia in terms of predator-avoidance processes ' (2002: 52).…”

“…'It Makes My Skin Crawl' ■ 47 The lack of attention to nature's central role in the structure of the modern symbolic order has important implications for our current study. As we have argued elsewhere (Davidson and Smith, 2003), given the prevalence and importance attached to maintaining a nature/culture dualism in modern Western society, it may be especially pertinent that the objects of specific phobias are almost always 'natural' things deemed to be inappropriately and uncontrollably present in 'cultural' situations. Such intrusions might be thought threatening, not because they pose a physical danger (evolutionary naturalism), nor because they are associated with the polluting affects of human bodily waste (psychoanalytic naturalism), but because they are indicative of nature itself transgressing the very basis of the symbolic order on which modern society and self-identity are founded.…”

Emotional Labour and Transnational Domestic Work: The Moving Geographies of ‘Maid Abuse’ in Singapore

“…Ahmed's (2001) work on asylum seekers and the language of 'love' and 'hate'); sexuality and sensuality (e.g. Gabb's (2004) paper on passion and desire inscribed in the intensity of 'maternal love' between lesbian mothers and their children; and Robinson et al's (2004) work on the material space of the home as both resource and constraint affecting the negotiation of heterosexual, emotional identities); disease outbreaks (Bennett's (2004) paper on emotions as ways of seeing during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in rural England); and phobias (Davidson's (2003) work on agrophobic anxieties and specific phobias of 'natural' objects; see also Davidson & Smith, 2003).…”