Animal Phobias
Tony Crisp
Some research suggests that our dream animal may represent a conscious phobia, and that left handed people, or those from a family in which left-handedness is frequent, may suffer phobia more frequently than people who are right handed. This is thought to arise out of the way the two brain hemispheres inter-relate. For instance the left hemisphere deals with rational thought and verbal concepts; the right deals with non-verbal ideas and feeling responses.
In most men and in right-handed people, the division of activity between the brain hemispheres is marked. In these cases the two hemispheres are said to be ‘lateralised.’ But in women and people who are left-handed, the brain’s hemispheres share many functions and are not so segregated, and the hemispheres are less lateralised.
In studying the frequency of animal phobias in left-handed people, the psychologist Paul Chemtob, found that left-handedness occurred in twenty percent of phobics whose problem was bad enough for them to seek treatment. Chemtob believes that where the lateralisation of the brain is high, the rational left side of the brain inhibits the action of the feeling responses in the right. In left-handed people however, this inhibiting action is not so pronounced, so the feeling reactions arising in the right brain hemisphere more readily break through into consciousness. This may explain why ninety five percent of phobic sufferers are women, and many of the men are left handed.
Connecting this with the animals we dream about, waking animal phobias, unless rooted in an actual encounter with an animal - for instance being bitten by a dog - may still represent our personal struggle with and fear of our own instinctive reactions and feelings. It is also probably true that all of us, left-handed or not, experience deeply moving feeling reactions such as anxiety in response to many events of our everyday life. But as Chemtob’s findings suggest, some people are physiologically, and thus also psychologically, better equipped to deal with such high levels of impulse than others. This can be thought of as a stronger or more resistant threshold for impulses such as fear or aggression to pass through before they impact upon the conscious personality. Therefore, in some people, such as women in general, and the left-handed in particular, their ‘animal’ is a much more insistent beast in their life.
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