372- Book – Les Phobies (Pedinielli/ Bertagne)

Book – Les Phobies : Agoraphobie, phobies sociales, phobies simples 

By : Jean-Louis Pedinielli & Pascale Bertagne 

Score :  5/10

Year:  2009

Publisher : Armand Colin 

ISBN : 978-2-200-34122-0

Pages : 126 (but starts at 7) 

Language : French

I borrowed this book at the Uni's library, as I'm always open to learn more about mental health topics, mental illnesses in general, and phobias in particular, because I suffer from several of them. 

This book is part of a series called 128, supposedly for the total number of pages each book of it carries. This count, however, is skewed as the editor uses the title-page as and 128 is the last printed page - the French Dépôt légal (legal deposit). 

After a short introduction, the book about phobias is divided into 4 main chapters, each covering a specific topic.

Thus, chapter 1, which is divided into 3 parts, le noyau des phobies, or, the core of phobias, explains the history of shifting approaches and understandings of phobias, passing through the clinical differences between phobias on one side, panic and anxiety disorders on the other. It details the different facets and several possible factors causing phobias, and how different psych' schools view and treat them differently. 

Chapter 2, Classifications, is divided into only 2 portions, discussing official definitions in DSM and CIM-10, as well as in psychoanalysis. It's only 3 pages long, so don't expect anything in-depth! 

Chapter 3 is the longest, runs p. 35-88, and is divided into 4 portions.  

The 1st and 2nd of these, which end p. 77 and thus correspond to the majority of the chapter, correspond to the Freudian and post-Freudian conceptions. This is a segment I found tedious in its presentation as well as case-studies for each school (Klein, American post-Freudians, Birrau, Lacan), all sharing, to a degree, a % of obsession in linking phobias to Oedipus complex, sexual repression VS morality, and other sex-based causes, which may some times be the case, but generalized from the start by the Freudian approach - which is never mentioned in this book to have been put in question more than once, as he often extrapolated this with no real data. 

Only the last part of chapter 3 pertains to cognitive & compartmental conceptions, which have been promoted by Beck, and which I found to be the soundest approach. 

Chapter 4 analyses several types of phobias, starting by children, and uses the same case studies as before - for the psychoanalytic Freudian schools, which bring back notions I found obsessively and more widely discussed in this book than the alternatives.  

The book ends with a conclusion, making the difference between anxiety, fear and phobia, which had been alluded to on and off earlier in the book ; and a small bibliography. 

Overall, I found this book to lack in material. I focused far too much on Freudian approaches, and didn't even discuss most of the known phobias, concentrating on very few examples and case studies. Then again, it should be a bigger book to cover more.