Fears, Phobias, and Therapy Speak

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Liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty. What was so complex about Oedipus? What are you afraid of if you have catagellophobia. And what did Freud actually call the id ego and superego? Take a seat and tell us how you're feeling. We'll unpack the origins and evolution of words for the inner workings of our minds on this psychological episode of Words Unravel ed . Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Seferis, author of etymology books, including useless etymology, and today we are on the couch on Words Unraveled, in the sense that we are delving into the human psyche and the depths of the mind. Yes, indeed. It is all in the mind this episode. We're going to go into psychological terms, their origins, and what they actually mean as well. Because there tends to be this phenomenon where we take on psychological words the lay people and we mis use them. Thinking of things like therapy speak, we'll get into that as well if that's one of those things that that winds you up. Yes, yes, and we'll talk through some phobias and other interesting words that have come out of this profession, which is pretty young, right? Is that fun? No. It wasn't meant to be, but yes, yes, it was. I'm afraid it was a pun. Oh we're already into psychoanalysis. You know, actually that's a pretty good place to start, isn't it? Psychoanalysis, Karl Jung, Sigmund Freud . Uh because they have coined a lot of the words that we use pretty frequently. Uh but actually uh like you say, it's it's it's a young discipline, only a bit more than a a century old, really. So what words do we get from Freud and Young and their Ilk? I think this one might be one that you should start out with because you when we were together not so long ago, we discussed the fact that the the id and the ego, which are frequently associated with Freud, are overly Latinized and he used them in he used preceding terms in a much more uh straightforward way, you might say. Aaron Powell So we have these terms that id, the ego, the super ego, which sound very technical because they do sound Latin. But they are coined by Freud. But he doesn't use those words. Those u words are used by the English translators of his work because he writes not in English, not in Latin, certainly, he writes in German. And he does not call them the id, the ego. He calls them the s and the ich , which is nothing more than the German for the it and the I, which is um amazing, I think. There are a few other ones the the primary translators that we see are A. A. Brill and Joan Rivier, who translated a lot of the terms that he used, which were German words, into more Latinized phrases, which that that tracks according to a lot of Europe an scientific speak, so to speak. Yeah, what's also interesting as well is that a lot of the time the word that enters English looks Latin or Greek, and that's because it is a translation of a German word that is inspired by Latin or Greek. I'm thinking of, for example, narcissism, which is from the German narcissism , right? Or ambivalence, right? It's from German ambivalence, right? Which is a German creation, but using pieces from classical languages. One in particular that's associated with Freud, it's called transference, right? It' s the notion of patients directing feelings formed in earlier relationships onto the analyst. But Freud used über tragung , which means a carrying over or a transfer. It's it's the same word, but in German with German elements. Is it Übertragung? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, d uh yes, exactly. I think if you've transfer some money to someone, that is also an Übertragung. It is literally transference. Yeah. It's it's an over dragging is a good way you could translate it into English. Like literally a moving from one place to another. Would be uh I'd have to say it written down. It would be not to say that your your pronunciation wasn't incredibly close. Great, I tried. Oh which is associated with Freud and was and and has now become a psychological term in English and in related romance languages using Latin elements after he used the German word for it. And again, it's a word that's entered into sort of public armchair psychology as well and speech about mental health. Also another one that's I think's quite interesting is unconscious, because I a lot of people will conf use subconscious and unconscious. And we'll talk about Freud in the context of the subconscious. But actually he was interested in the unconscious mind rather than the subconscious. So what's the thing? Well exactly. They've they've basically merged with one another, right now. But but I mean he's his when he talked about the unconscious mind, he literally means things you do not know you are thinking. Ah. Right. And that's that's the whole point. For example, with the Oedipus Complex, which we should absolutely go into. So the Oedipus Complex is the idea that boys want to murder their father and have sex with their mother, which is something that poor old Oedipus in Greek myth does do despite trying not to. You know, we'll go into some of these myths uh a little later in in the the podcast because it's worth just talking through them all. But the point is, no man knows that they have this complex. Right. Right. That's the the whole point. It is unconscious. So you can't actually behave in such a way intentionally that leads you in that direction. So if you do feel sexually attracted to your mother, that is not what Freud is actually talking about. He's talking about an unconscious attachment to your mother. You don't even know about. But this is the thing, it's also very hard to disprove something if the whole point of it is that, well, even if you've got it, you don't know about it. Right, right. Well, should we go into that right now? Because it does it does connect with Jung as well, because he has the opposite, which is the electric complex, which has been widely discredited despite the fact that the Oedipus complex is usually considered to be a real thing, you know? Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean the thing with psychoanalysis oh by the way, psychoanalysis is Freud and then Jung's his school of thought is known as analytic psychology. So basically I, mean they they seem like very, very similar concepts, and I'm not smart enough to delineate exactly what the difference between them is. But you know, I was a little flippant a second ago. This this is this is extremely serious and and important medical and therapeutic knowledge. Well it isn't it isn't right, because they're generally not taken very seriously now, these these theories in even in the world of s sort of psychoanalysis . But they are that they are sort of foundational. I don't think the idea that we all do want to make love with the parent of the opposite sex is is is practiced that much. I mean there obviously are people that go right back to basics and they do preach this stuff. But but generally it I don't want to say discredited, but a a lot of it has been sort of s set aside. So you can be sort of flippant about it. Freud boiled a lot of these notions down into bodily functions. The things that control our inner psyche are often per his analysis related to our mouths, the way we eat, the our waste, etc. Yeah the latent stage, the genital stage, and all of this sounds very um all of this is very physical. Yeah, I mean when we talk about someone being analy retentive, we're referring to Freud's theory, right? If you have one of these fixations, oral, anal , whatever, sometimes sometimes these just pop up in uh everyday speech in the idioms that we use It's kind of kind of amazing. Sometimes we're using Freud when we we don't know we are, or Jung when we don't know we are. If we talk about someone having a complex full stop, we're using Junggian verbiage. When we talk about introverts and extroverts, we're talking in Jungian speak because he turned those terms from adjectives you can be intro vert or be extrovert. You turn them into nouns, you know, you can be an introvert or an extrovert. Although here's the funny thing about the word extrovert: he was really annoyed by the spelling extrovert , which is the one that we generally use now because he said it was bad Latin. Mm-hmm. Extra outward, intro, inward. Yeah, exactly. But we said we were going to talk about Oedipus and Electra, didn't we? Yes, we did. You did. I've never really paid enough attention to the story of Oedipus, so I did have a good old read of it ahead of this. Can I run you through Sure, yeah. This is uh I actually really enjoyed this play. I've read it a few times. Right. So the play is uh Oedipus Rex. Yeah, he sometimes gets referred to as Oedipus Tyrannus, right? Mm-hmm. King Oedipus, which is what he eventually becomes. But to start with, he's he's not a king at the start of the story, he's a little baby, isn't he? So immediately is the victim of a murder attempt Yeah, that's it. So his father has been told that his son is going to try and kill him and uh have sex with his wife. So Oedipus's father, who are called uh father who's called Laos, who's the king of Thebes, or the ruler of Thebes , and uh his wife Jacasta , they give baby Oedipus to a slave and tell them to leave him on the side of a mountain where he'll get gobbled up by beasts. The slave decides they don't want to do that. They give him to a shepherd instead. And the shepherd takes him to Corinth. And in Corinth he gets adopted by the king of Corinth, Polybus. Later on, when he's a bit older, Oedipus discovers that he is a bastard and wants to find out who his parents are. So he leaves for Delphi to consult the Oracle to Apollo about his heritage. But the Oracle tells him, oh, by the way, you're um yeah, you're destined to kill your dad and have sex with your mum. So fearing that, he doesn't return to Corinth, instead he goes to Thebes 'cause he thinks that's a safe place to go . On the way there , he encounters a man in the road who gives him a hard time and he kills him. Whoops. And then when he gets to the wars of Thebes , he is set a challenge by a Sphinx. Of course he is. No one has ever passed the challenge of the Sphinx, which is a riddle, but Oedipus manages to solve the riddle. The riddle being, which animal has one voice but two three, or four feet being slowest on three? The answer being man . I can't get my head around why that is. That's the same it's the same notion as the riddle what walks on four legs then two legs then three legs and it's also a person. They c you crawl when you're a baby, you stand on two legs when you're an adult and then you walk with a cane when you're older. The third leg's the cane. I I''mm d not happy with that. I'm not happy with that. I I'm sorry, Sphinx, but I think that's a bit of a s bit of a swiz. Anyway, and because he ma he his you know the the sole person to pass the Sphinx's test, he gets made king because the position is vacant because the king's just died and his poor widow's left with no husband. So he ends up taking the king's place and um marrying the king's widow. Of course it turns out that the king's widow is his mum. Yep they have some kids, he doesn't know it. And it turns out the man in the road that he's killed is the former king, now dead, his dad. And when he finds out that he has done exactly as prophesied, uh he blinds himself, which is extreme. Total normal reaction. Yeah, and his mum kills herself. Oopsie poopsie. It's all gone a bit wrong. So that's that is the story of Oedipus. Do you object to how I pronounce Oedipus, by the way? Because I've heard it pronounced Oedipus. I don't I don't think so. Um but I usually say Oedipus and I have heard it I've heard it said that way. I think it is a transatlantic difference. Yeah, I think so. Um and then the deal with Electra, it's not quite as it doesn't fit quite as perfectly with the you know, just the perfect inverse of the Oedipus complex, which is Electra is the daughter of Agamemnon and Climinestra in Greek myth, and she helped kill her mother to avenge her father, and Young uses this term to describe a girl's competition with her mother for her father's attention during that phallic stage that we mentioned when children form early attachments and rivalries, and then modern psychology was like, no, no, thanks, and then uh and most major diagnostic manuals and such do not consider it to be a thing. But I otherwise I do actually I I have you watched Fraser? I have. I have I love that show. I have what I have also watched it many times. So one of my favorite lines is when Niles, who is Frasier's brother, stands in for him on his radio show, he says, Well, Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian, so there'll be no blaming mother today. That show is so dorky sometimes. Oh, it's so good though . I think it might be why I am the way I am because I watched it when I was about eight. We have a few psychological terms from myth, from Greek myth. I was looking up a few of these. Obviously we do have narcissism , which is obviously from the story of narcissist, the handsome youth who is cursed to fall in love with his reflection in a pool, um Um of course, a love that he can never actualize because it's made of water, but it's just uh but what I found interesting while researching this was the earliest sort of use of that term in psychological contract contexts was by a guy called Paul Knacker. He was credited by Freud as using it first, and it was that German word Nazismus to describe basically a sex ual perversion in which you are turned on by your own body. So the original narcissism is excessive masturbation. Oh yeah. Clinical. This is Yeah, exactly. But also sort of a little bit later it's interpreted as uh a perfectly normal part of childhood development, so a sort of interest in your own body. But if you revert to that when you're an adult and you become sort of a little bit obsessed with your own looks and your own hand someness, uh then yeah, that's a problematic form of narcissism. And then presumably that was extended extended to being overly invested in your own sense of I don't know, value. Vanityity. Yeah, van. There you go. Yeah, vanity. Although I think even before it was used clinically, Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the word narcissism. In fact, he's the earliest citation for two forms of it: narcissism and narciss ine, uh both appear, it seems in the poetry of colorage first, but they're you know they're basically s say, you know, behaving like narcissism, that is you know a byword for vanity.aron Powell What other words come from myth? Well there's echolalia, which is again a normal part of speech development, but also can be a a symptom of adult um mental health problems. Echolalia is named after Echo, so Narcissus's not lover, actually, unrequited lover. She falls in love with Narcissus. Echo is oh bless her. She was a chatty nymph who was chatting away to Hera while Zeus was getting up to no good . And Hera blames her for distracting her. Of course . And so curses her to only ever be able to repeat the words of others. Ah and then because she's so in love with Narcissus and Narcissus isn't interested, he's too in love with his own reflection, she pines and pines until she no longer exists but for her voice. And so that's what what an echo is. And echo lalia means echo speech. And it's something that I mean I'm I'm seeing it right now from my little daughter. It's where you just repeat what other people are saying. You know, and and it is a a very normal part of learning to speak. You know, someone says something to you and you make their noise back at them. Someone says to you, banana, and they go, nah na. Echo Lalia. What was her first word ? She did the usual but uh you know, mama . Although she flips between Dada and Papa because my French wife and I are are locked in battle over that one. Genuinely uh the first one was banana. She really loves banana, but it comes out as as Nana because I did a video about how babies acquire words. And one of the things they do is they're learning is to spot the patterns in languages. And when you get a borrowed word like banana, where the emphasis, for example, is is you know the second syllable when in English, normally you expect the emphasis to be on the first syllable, then they get confused. So that's why they say nana or pewter instead of computer. Ah. So it is it's nana and it's adorable. That is adorable. Uh the Lalia bit in Echolalia is also in a udian era term. This is late nineteenth century from Georges Gilles de la Tourette, which who coined the term cop rol alia, which it it described the you'll recognize his last name as being the name of a syndrome. He used this term to describe the use of specifically involuntary obscene language in patients with neurological disorders. This was well before um what we now call Tourette's syndrome was well understood and it it specifically focused on on obscene language. So coprolalia means dung speak. Oh yeah, so yeah, like I I was gonna just come up just throw out the word coprophile there as if it's a normal word to me. That's also one of those words, and it means the same thing but attraction to that. So Yes. But now we understand Tourette's syndrome does not have to involve obscen ity . Also, when we're talking about myth and psychology, we should talk about the fact that psyche is the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology. She's eventually the goddess of the soul. She starts off as a mortal, as a princess who um falls in love with Eros . Well rather, he falls in love with her . She gets tricked into looking at him when he's she's not supposed to look at his face. It's a whole long story uh that involves her being set a load of tasks by Aphrodite. These tasks include having to sort a pile of different grains by nightfall, but luckily a helpful swarm of ants do it for her. She's also tasked with having to collect the golden fleece of these raging rams that have the golden fleece um but then she's advised by it's like a fur or a reed advises her talking reed tells her you know what you could do you could just wait until night and collect it off the bushes, which is what she ends up doing instead. Anyway, she ends up finding Eros uh in the underworld, um , and he makes her immortal so that she uh she can come back to life after she accidentally looks into a a a box she shouldn't have looked in. I'm telling this story so well. Doing a wonderful job. But it's one of those things. So psyche means soul in ancient Greek and is also the goddess of soul. Soul and breath and life, kind of in the same way as uh animal, right also means breath and life and spirit and uh plato and aristotle later would use de anima right as this principle that organized living bodies and and a lot of that got ported over into late 18th, late 19th century psychology terms. We also have others from uh from literature like archetypes and things, which Jung applied to family archetypes like the mother and the fat her and things like that. Aaron Powell It's interesting how these terms like spirit and soul and life uh do get changed. And mind and how they they they swap around. So now we talk about psychology as the study of the mind, but science of of psychology and psychiatry. The terms that we used for mental illness and mental conditions were not kind, right? Even as recently as 1845, England had a lunacy act, for example.aron Powell So this is the idea that your moods are inspired by the moon. Right, of course. And we also have related terms like lunatic and moonstruck and things like that describing the same notion. The best legacy that you can describe from from Freud and Jung would be that they took these conditions more seriously and started talking about them in ways that weren't just we'll put them in an asylum, you know? Yeah, they're ultimately trying to find the root cause of them so that they can be treated. The notion of being moonstruck or moonsick or a lunatic also dates back to old English. There was moon shick, which literally means moonsick, and then monath siconas, which means moonsickness as well. The word moonstruck though is from paradise lost originally. And then of course loony is a is a variation on lunatic. Ah right. Okay . Yeah. That oh that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I mean it's one of those things that w words that were sort of clinical at the time do become insulting later on. There were some attempts to clinicalize mental health before this. They weren't great. But but for example, there was a British physician named Thomas Sutton who used who tried to describe delirium and things like that. He used the term delirious for the symptoms of alcohol abuse, the psychological symptoms of of alcohol abuse. And that word is actually really interesting because it quite literally, it very nearly literally means to be off the rails. The root there means furrow. So deliriare in Latin means to go off a furrow and was used in Latin as in reference to mental illness, which is interesting. I'm just thinking of the famous Belgian brewery called Delirium. Yes. Delirium tremens . What is that? Delirium tremens. We've talked about it before. It's like the shakes from alcohol abuse. And I it's also the state in which you see the pink elephants. Yes, exactly. That's why their logo is a pink elephant. If we're talking about people who coined words that we use all the time when talking about psychology, we should talk about Eugen bloiler is the most incredible name. Eugenbloiler. I think you were just telling me his name was something really dull, actually. His first name is Paul. His name is Paul Paul Eugenbloiler, which I don't know, is Paul pronounced differently in in Swiss? I mean if he's speaking German it's Paul. Paul Euler. He coined well, he coined schizophrenia, for example. The term was uh the the the condition was being referred to as dementia pracox before he called it schizophren ia. Um but obviously again these words are all coined in German, so he could you could he talked about Schiz phrene, right, is the German pronunciation of it. But he he he also talked about Schizophren ien , which means schizophrenia's because there are a variety of different ones. But in describing schizophrenia, he also coined two other terms that we use. One I already mentioned ambivalence ambivalence, which is having two coexisting but profoundly opposing emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and another one that he called as a symptom of schizophrenia is aut ism, a word that we do use a great deal, which he coined as a detachment from reality. But obviously, as we understand autism more and more, we don't really think of it as that at all anymore. You mentioned him and these words in your show recently. I did. Yes, I did. Yes, you did. Yeah, thank you so much for coming over to see it in London. I thought it was excellent. It was fun to compare. If Rob does this again, I highly recommend going to see it because it was a fantastic show at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, and he did two in one day because the first one sold out. Well thank you for bragging on my behalf, Jess, for that. I mean that the most exciting part of it was having you around and getting to show you bits of London, but also bits of Derbyshire as well. We had a lovely time up at Chatsworth House. We had tea at Mr. Darcy's house. Mr. Darcy's house with Martin as well, who's editing this video. Very fun. I did not feel ambivalent about any of that as a matter of fact. Which you you discussed in particular because there's a modern usage of ambivalent that means you don't really care one way or another, but in the context of a symptom of schizophrenia, which means a splitting of the mind, ambivalence means strength valentia, like valence electrons and things like that on strength on both sides and be being both sides. Basically it is a spin-off of the word equivalence. Right. It's having two equally strong opinions. Bloiler thinks we've got equivalence, we need yeah, we need an opposite of equivalence and he creates ambivalence. Yeah, and I was making the point that the word ambivalence is kind of skunked. It's a word that's through having two different meanings is basically useless now because half the people that you use it towards will think you mean you've got strong feelings but in two directions that you're conflicted and the other half will think that you don't really care. When you asked the audience to raise their hands uh about that definition, I was surprised at how many people raised their hands for having that sort of like blas e not caring sense or associating it with not caring one way or another. Because I've always uh I don't know, I guess I've always thought of it as being torn. Well, I mean that is a I suppose a truer relation. It's older meaning as coined uh Bloiler. Yeah, exactly. But I I think I hear ambivalent used more often to mean not really caring either way. To your point about Bloiler, you mentioned he coined the term autism, but he used it to refer to symptoms that he believed were caused by schizophrenia. And then it changed. It was applied in nineteen thirty-eight to the condition we now consider to be called uh autism by Hans Osberger, who is associated with the the now we don't use the term anymore, but Asperger's syndrome was then was used for a while for a similar condition in child psychology Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up, which could help your driving. Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter as it dries? What has keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now . Twelve months, a towel. Piano. Enjoy being fully alert. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. The Army 10 Miler is on. Race in person at the Pentagon or go virtual from anywhere. Every mile support U.S. Army soldier and family programs. Register or volunteer now at army10myler.com. Run. Volunteer. Be part of something bigger. Let's talk about some things that scare us. Let's talk about fears and phobias a little bit. Now I get a bit grumpy when we talk when we've talked about these in the past, because you can basically coin a fear for anything you want. I want ones that exist. You don't want Hippopotamonstro, Sesquipedalia phobia. The fear of long words. Right. With a bunch of like stupid multilingual roots and bits on it. Oh yeah. Well you you've got an even greater fear of actually no, I think you're you're you're more of a file than a phobe of Yes. Hybrid words. Hybrid words and and whatnot. But anyway, a phobia, phobos is from is Greek and it means fear or literally flight from something. The phobias existed in Greek medical contexts first, but one of the earliest phobia words to appear in English was hydrophobia, which is recorded as early as the fourteenth century as another word for rabies , which is one of the classic sym symptoms of rabies, is still called hydrophobia, and it's because you physically can't swallow. It's terrifying. Place to be is suffering from rabies. Another interesting thing here. So psychology research that we've been talking about from this era, late 19th, early 20th century, ported that terminology into more public discourse around fears, including like nationality and gender identity and sexual preference and stuff, which we see in like xenophobia and homophobia, which are more biases than fears, right? But they're rooted the notion is that they're rooted in fear. An interesting twist, the word homophobia originally meant fear of humans and most commonly was used in the context of animals. Before the mid-20th century, a homophobic horse was one that didn't like people. And it's because it's using the Latin sense of homo seen in the term homo sapiens. It meant human and was related to the word hominid. However, most English words that incorporate homo, like hominym and hom ogenous are using the unrelated Greek homos meaning same, which is why homophobia is meaning shifted to describe first a clinical fear of people who sexually or romantically prefer the same sex and then fear fueled hatred of them later, which I think is kinda neat. That makes so much sense now you've just explained it like that. Because you could easily interpret h homophobia as also being fear of men. Yeah. Right. And therefore homosex uality being you know, sexual attraction to men. But what homosexuality is actually is sexual attraction to the same. Many phobias, however, are still mostly found in like psychology psychological healt h contexts. The American Psych Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, has an official list of pilihas uh and also phobias, philias being like paraphilias, also known as kinks, but their phobia list includes things like arachy buterophobia, arachi buterophobia. Do you know what that means? Can you guess? I do know this because I put it in my newsletter a few weeks back. I've I but actually, so it's it's peanut butter. Is it ha is it fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth? I don't know, actually. I just know it means fear of peanut butter. I think it's one of those ones where if you look at these on the internet, what you often find is it'll say this word means a fear of and then complex uh explanation. But actually the etymology of the word, the breakup of the word is actually much simpler. So in that case, all over the internet says the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the top of your the roof of your mouth. But actually, what it literally says is fear of uh peanut butter. There was this other one about fear that a duck is secretly watching you. I was oh But what it it literally means is just fear of ducks. You know, it doesn't actually mean fear that says duck is secretly watching you, but it comes from the context of I think it's from a a far side comic. It's said in the comic to describe the fear that a duck is watching you. This is related to to the Samuel Johnson word, anetiferous , meaning producing duc ks . We talked about this in our dictionary episode. One of the weird words you'll find in Samuel Johnson's dictionary is anatiferous, which means producing ducks. Producing ducks. And I I can't remember whether we figured out what it was, but we speculated that it had something to do with the notion of like barnacle geese being born from trees and barnacles and whatnot. Just a very, very specific word for what one duck might do. A couple other ones, like real ones, include amaxophobia or hamaxophobia, meaning fear of riding in a car with the Greek root meaning carriage. I guess it could also apply to carriages. We got fear of failure, which is atikophobia, which uh the Greek root there means unfortunate. There's um cacophobia, which is fear of ugliness. Yeah. Greek kakos. Mm-hmm. Which feels like fear of bad, doesn't it, really? It just means fear of badness. I mean it's also from the same root as the word defecate. Yes. Yeah. And cacophony as well. Bad bad sound. Euphobia would be a good sort of contrasting one, which is often said as being a fear ar of heing good news. That's what the internet to tell you it means, but literally it just means good phobia. I said that it's related to the word defecate. It's not. It's from the same proto Indo Europe I'm sorry, it's from a proto Indo European root that means defecate.er Dientff thing. And it is related to the word cac. Yes. Uh-huh. And caca and things like that. All of the American. Yeah, indeed. These are all these are all beautiful. I'm glad we got to to caca. I like uh I like the flow of catagalophobia, meaning fear of being ridiculed, which I think we all probably have a little bit of. I mean, I suppose you can have like a a a fear of it to the degree that you can't go out in public or something to that extent. But I don't know that anyone really wants to be ridiculed. Aaron Powell No, and and I always think of a phobia, for it to be a phobia, it needs to be to some extent irrational. So that's gotta be. It's the intensity. There shouldn't be a phobia of being mauled by a lion, right? Because that would be that's a that's a thing worth being scared of. It's not a phobia. It's perfectly it's perfectly rational. Ergophobia is a good one. Have you come across this? Ooh, tell me. We've talked about ergo before when we've talked about the word ergo phone. Fear of work. It's a fear of work. Ergophobia . That's why we podcast for a living. Indeed. Terrible er gophobes. And also we we mentioned not that long ago about agoraphobia, agora being named after the agora as in like the meeting place in ancient Greece, because it was massive, basically. And so that if you're scared of large places full of people, then you'd be scared of the agora. I uh I get a little bit of uh people have kind of pop culturalized this one because it's not actually a something that's crippling in any sense. I'm sure for some people it is, but megalophobia, there are a couple of subreddits dedicated to this, and you you just see very big things and it makes your stomach drop a little bit. Like if you see a a wide shot of a blue whale, it always makes me go like it's not scary. It's just like it's a little bit of a a little tingly. If I could just draw a link between everything we've said here and a broader theme of psychology. It's that none of these words were known to the ancient Greeks. Right. I have to point all of this out. They did not have all of these phobias. They've all been coined since Ditto. They did not have the word psychology either, the word psychol ogy is a much more recent invention. And basically most of those words that start with psycho were unknown to the ancient Greeks. Described the way the mind works, but not to the extent or to the gr degree of nuance that we see later in eight nineteenth century and twentieth century psychology contexts. A couple more silly phobias before we get off this tra in would be uh phobophobia, which is fear of phobias . And then if you need a word for the fear of Friday the thirteenth, then it's periscava deca triophobia So wh which bit of that is Friday? Paraske vi is the Greek for Friday, and then Deca Trius is thirteenth. There's also this Xemophobia, which is fear of the great mole rat , but I don't know why that exists. I think they're kinda ugly cute, but I can also see why they would be scary. And a lot of the time these words have been coined for a specific moment. Um and then they make it into these online lists because Because they're a bit funny. And then here we are perpetuating them. Yes, we are. They're fun to think about. They are fun to think about because they also lead you towards the ro ots of these words which then lead you to the roots of other words. That's why it's worth talking about cacophobia, right? Yes indeed. Jess, I want to talk about the pretty modern phenomenon of therapy speak. Is this when people sort of self-diagnose on the internet? Yeah, that's a big part of it. Absolutely. It's so actually I was struggling with how I would define this myself. So I I looked up a paper on it. And I'll just read you their definition if you want. This is by two uh Spanish researchers. They wrote this last year, Carmen Isen mas and Manuel Almagro. Uh and they say therapy speak refers to a modern linguistic trend, a sort of linguistic practice, particularly present among privileged people, characterized by the imprecise and superficial use of psychotherapy language originally developed by mental health professionals for clinical settings in everyday communication by people who are not mental health professionals and whose main concern is not mental health, especially within online, social and personal realms. Okay, that's a bit of a mouthful. I think the best thing I can do is give you some examples of what are considered therapy speak uh in therapy circles, right? So by people who work in the field, the words that they think that people are misusing more broadly. So in this paper they say outside of therapy sessions, people are using set boundaries, hold space, reject toxicity. People are warned about the dangers of gaslighting, narcissism and love bombing. That people are talking about others as being toxic or abusive, codependent. They're talking about coping mechanisms, traumas, anxieties, emotional triggers, being a bit depressed or a bit OCD or a bit bipolar or, you know, practicing self care, using these terms outside of a clinical context and using them in a way that devalues the terms themselves, basically , and take sort of the sort of precis ion out of them. Aaron Powell I can imagine that someone who has severe obsessive compulsive disorder to the point where it it it hinders them from living their lives in the way that they want to and who are being treated for that might hear people who prefer cleanliness in their house at but do not have a a diagnosable form of that disorder or or condition being frustrated that their their condition is being trivialized or described in a non-clinical way. Aaron Powell But also there's a way in which it's being used by one person to sort of uh essentially abuse another calling someone narcissistic as a as a weapon. Yeah, exactly. Or talking about boundaries when a when what you know, emotional or relationship boundaries when what actually you're doing is imposing strict control s on someone saying oh so the boundary okay so I'll mention who this is all the who I'm thinking of here is Jonah Hill, right? Supposedly leaked text messages from him to his then girlfriend. This was back in twenty twenty-three, talked about boundaries in this way. Uh he he told his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady, who was a professional surfer that she wasn't with men, post pictures of herself wearing a bathing suit model or have friendships with women who are in unstable places. So you can hear the therapy speak coming through there. And he describes that as his boundaries for a romantic relationship. So using therapy speak there to disguise what is clearly pretty coercive behavior. That's one of the one of the problems of it as well. Yeah, describing people you're disagreeing with as toxic as well, I think. Well this is also one of the the problems set out in this paper is that these words are coined. You have to coin words for for for all manner of condition, because you know some it's sometimes said something doesn't exist unless it has a name. So you do need to have terms for these things. And a lot of time, these terms are invented to sort of empower someone to be able to overcome that situation. But now what is often happening is that the people who are the suppressors are are able to this is why they mentioned the word privilege, right? Are able to take those words and use them with a a completely different interpretation against the people that designed to try and help. It's a good example of it outside of therapy speakers, for example, the word woke, right? The word woke is originally coined to help enable people to be more socially aware to encourage it, but it in the end it ends up being adopted by other people as an insult , you know, which is yeah, obviously a problem. Which always strikes me as a little funny because like is it's the opposite of that asleep? Yeah I mean I don't think people that use it that way think that far ahead but uh I know anyway I got I got on my little high horse there. A little bit there. This reminds me of the way that earlier terms, like pre scientific psychiatry terms or or even like turn of the century, turn of the twentieth century terms for people with mental disabilities have been pejor ated as well, have been turned into insults. Words like imbecile and moron and and things like that were maybe misused in a critical setting from our perspective, but were used sort of not as insults prior and then have become insults because we have learned that they are either they've been oversimplifized i oversimplif ied, they've been abused, they've been used as insults, or their meaning has just been lost entirely. Or their original meaning has been lost entirely. That's the point.