Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1999
The Construction of Fear Barry Glassner
The paper derives applications of an observation about how fears are constructed by people in their daily lives in order to expand upon developments and critiques in constructionist analyses of scares in the news media. KEY WORDS: fear; media; social construction; theory.
This essay proposes a link between scares promulgated through the news media and their acceptance by readers or viewers. Put simply, my proposal is this: Fear is constructed through efforts to protect against it. This conceptualization runs at right angles to the familiar notion of fear as an emotion that people employ in response to danger. On the contrary, I want to suggest that many fears are constructed to protect against other fears, and indeed, against fear itself. While I do not contend, as did President Roosevelt in 1933, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," fear is certainly one thing we have to fear, and it often occupies a more pivotal position than sociologists commonly acknowledge. An appreciation of fear as constructed through the ways people protect themselves against fear, while counter-intuitive for those who view fear as a protective response to external dangers, is, nonetheless, common among at least one group of interpreters of human behavior. Therapists witness the phenomenon when they work with over-protected children who make sense of why they need so much protection by conjuring up all sorts of monsters and bogeymen. Therapists also encounter adults who dodge their fears of fraud, inadequacy, or mortality by incessant attention to minor malfunctions in their homes or their bodies. Therapists work also with anorexics who, unable or unwilling to face their fears of loss of control in intimate relationships, become terrified of fat.
Direct correspondence to Barry Glassner, Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089.
301 © 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc.