(2 of 2)
Weekes believes that in most cases psychoanalysis is the wrong approach. She has found that prolonged stress or shock—a death, divorce or birth —can turn ordinary anxiety into a flash of panic. Then, she says, "the fear that it will recur keeps a person within a restricted orbit. What's the use of looking into that person's childhood for an explanation?"
Freudians, of course, do just that. In their view, agoraphobia, like all phobias, is a symbolic expression of deeply threatening sexual and/or aggressive urges. One difference, says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Walter Stewart, is that agoraphobics are "generally angrier and sicker" than other phobics. Why are most agoraphobics female? Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson believes that men generally deal with anxiety by compulsively facing it. "If they are afraid of violence, they may become addicted to football, play it, see it again and again. Women are basically phobic; men are basically counterphobic."
Other Freudians say that because women traditionally associate the open streets with prostitutes and the danger of rape, agoraphobia can be a coded fantasy for illicit sex, a replay of the child's sexual attraction to her father during the Oedipal stage (starting around age 3).
Feminists and most non-Freudian therapists disagree. They believe women are more susceptible to agoraphobia because they are taught as girls that the outside world is dangerous and then grow up to be stay-at-home housewives who can afford to nurse their fears of the unknown. Give women confidence and jobs outside the home, they say, and female agoraphobia will drop to the male level.
Robert Seidenberg of Syracuse is one analyst who has bought the feminist argument. Says he: "We are confronted with the paradox that women are declared phobic when they exhibit anxiety in public places where custom, until yesterday, had prohibited them from entering. If one replaces the idea that the woman had the desire to sleep with father with the thought that she wanted to work with him in his downtown office, more salutary results might be obtained."
All schools of agoraphobia experts agree that experience in facing new situations can moderate some of the symptoms. That seems to be the case with Joel Oppenheimer, whose attacks are now milder and far rarer. Says he: "I think it has something to do with aging and also with my divorce. When I became a single parent, I just had to get out more. Besides, agoraphobia is on its way out as a cocktail-party topic. Everyone I know is now into low blood sugar.'' -