The fears of the elderly.
The lack of a clear life rhythm, the narrowing of the sphere of communication, the withdrawal from active work, the syndrome of "nest devastation", the withdrawal of a person from himself/herself, the feeling of discomfort from the closed space and many other life events and situations can be considered as the main sources of fear among the elderly and seniors. The strongest is the fear of loneliness in old age. Loneliness in old age can be linked to living apart from young family members. However, more significant in old age are psychological aspects: isolation, self-isolation, reflecting the awareness of loneliness as a misunderstanding, indifference from others. Loneliness becomes especially real for a person who lives for a long time. The heterogeneity and complexity of loneliness is reflected in the fact that the old man, on the one hand, feels an increasing gap with others, afraid of a lonely lifestyle; on the other hand, he seeks to isolate himself from others, to protect his world and stability in it from the invasion of outsiders. One of the very serious reasons for the disruption of communication with others lies in the violation of the relationship of the elderly with young people.
Factors affecting the emergence of fear
Not all contemporaries shared the notion of innate emotion of fear, most considered fear to be an acquired property.
The first experience of fear in a person arises at birth, which objectively means separation from the mother, and therefore the state of fear is regarded as a "reproduction of the trauma of birth". Some followers of the psychoanalytic direction have also made attempts to connect various phobias with the "birth trauma". Some, for example, considered the disruption of a happy intrauterine existence during childbirth as the root cause of fear. Others focused on the early connections between mother and child and the possibility of the mother's anxiety passing on to her child.
Any emotion can activate fear based on the principle of emotional infestation. The reactions of fear and arousal due to the similarity of their neurophysiological mechanisms to the mechanisms underlying the fear emotion are often the latter's activators. He believes that the basic interrelation between emotions of interest, surprise and fear is caused by similarity of their neurophysiological mechanisms. Sudden and complete release from prolonged and intense fear activates joy, while partial release from fear causes excitement. Feedback between fear and arousal is observed when the emotion of interest-excitement develops into fear.
Pain is the first and most important of the natural activators of fear. Any object, event, or situation associated with pain can be a conditional stimulus that reminds the individual of a past mistake and pain experience. However, numerous experiments show that when a dangerous object is repeatedly presented, animals successfully avoid it without showing signs of fear.
Height as an activator of fear can also be seen as a natural danger signal. Under certain conditions, and at a certain stage of individual development, children become afraid of heights. The results showed that already at four months of age children are able to perceive the depth. To date, it is only known that, despite the fact that children begin to crawl at different ages (from seven to eleven months), they discover fear of height and fall from height only after three weeks of crawling experience.
Thus, the main factors influencing the emergence of fear are due to biological (heredity) and social (associative learning and social borrowing) effects.
Psychoanalysis believes that fear is not a disease, but a guide to the real problems, to the true concerns of man. Treatment of a phobia in this case consists in finding its true cause. Talking about the symptom, the person perceives it as a part of his being. During psychoanalysis and work around this being, the signs of a phobia lose their status.