User blog comment:Nanepul/irrational fears./@comment-1988716-20141012165118

Something to consider, psychologically, about phobias: They're misdirections of unprocessed grief or trauma. They usually come about when we're very young, and the thing about a young mind is it is very fragile. A little kid likely won't have the cognitive capacity to fathom everything that happens to them, so if something happens that shakes their worldview without warning, their mind might cope by averting any thought of it, even fixing an external object to "represent" that shattered worldview.

For instance: I loved insects and spiders when I was very young. Then my granddad died when I was four, and I was upset but still too young to really comprehend all the implications of death. It was around this time that I suddenly started fearing bugs. I knew they didn't threaten me, but whenever I saw one I felt like it was going to kill me and it would be the most terrible and painful death imaginable. I feared spiders because I feared death and found it to be so much bigger a oncept than I could handle.

So. I'm not saying it's arguable that the most thematically appropriate way to handle every single Irrational Fear would be to consider them, OOG, archetypes of existing Vanilla Fear concepts, but at the same time why else would I have started this sentence with "I'm not saying _____ but?"

The point is phobias are not irrational. Just the way they manifest is, but the way Fears manifest in stories is almost always irrational.