STOP RUNNING SCARED!

Ominous start: co-author Baer talks about her personal phobias and what a good job husband-analyst-collaborator Fensterheim did at assuaging them. The trouble is that she has so many that what little credibility she managed to muster in her book How to be an Assertive Not Aggressive Woman is totally destroyed. Ominous middle: Fensterheim details behaviorist techniques that YOU can use to rid yourself of fears like Anticipatory Anxiety (I'll go down in flames), Social Fears (They don't like me), the now popular Agoraphobia, and things of that ilk. Behaviorism--with systematic desensitization, you can make yourself do virtually anything--is the mode these days. But, when faced with examples like the following, we tend to long for some Freudian insight: Pauline R. was engaged. But she couldn't marry because she was phobic about hypodermic needles, and wouldn't take the blood test. She was advised to get a play needle and practice stabbing herself with it. Then, she was to watch other people getting stabbed. ""This served as a coping model,"" Fensterheim tells us. She was able to go ahead with the test and the marriage. Throughout, our worst fears are realized. This is awful.