CONQUEST OF FEAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

CONQUEST OF FEAR.

THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX.

(By S.)

If we look for them we shall find plenty* of incentives to fear, and plenty of people whose lives are more governed by fear than by anything else. That is why our psychologists and psychoanalysts have so much to say about fear. It is true that seamen are not now reluctant, as they once were, to start a voyage on a Friday, but there is still an astonishing proportion of seamen and of others who are perturbed if they rind themselves one in a company of 13. Education has much yet to do to get men and women in general weaned of forebodings that rob them not only of happiness but of achievement.

Fear is not always, however, ari infirmity of the mind. It is often natural, and , even commendable. It would be strange if a mother with young children did not feel anxious on the outbreak of an epidemic in her neighbourhood, and no less strange if she did not feel still more anxious at seeing one of her sons or daughters in their 'teens at home in bad company. And who of us would not naturally grow pale and feel a sinking at the heart if we were told that our employer had no further need for us, or that we had to undergo a serious operation ?

In a good many cases fear is due to what is called an inferiority complex, to paying too much importance, for instance, to what others think of us, and to being over-humble. We have a classical example of the latter kind of fear in Bunyan's Mr. Fearing. His depreciation of himself went beyond reason. It was 6uch an excess of humility that it made him fear he would come short of whither he had a desire to go, with the result that he magnified difficulties, left but little room in his heart for faith in God, and hung back. Heredity has a good deal to do with the inferiority complex of some of us, so has our upbringing, and so has our health, which means that whether our life is, or is not, largely governed by fear, really depends on ourselves. As the old joke says in answer to the question, "Is life worth living?" it all depends on the liver. Only we ourselves can cultivate our bodily health, and only we ourselves can school ourselves in quietness, confidence, and selfpossession. And a lesson or two' in psychological study of how to avoid fear —thought, and to believe in our own powers will help us.

But trust in God will help us even more. It is not customary in psychological teaching to take account of God as a factor in human life. But our wiser forefathers laid more store on faith in Him than on faith in themselves. It was, indeed, their faith in God that gave them their faith in themselves, and that gave them their great qualities of courage, fortitude, constancy and endurance. They knew little or nothing of psychology, most of them, and nothing whatever of its jargon, of them, but they knew their Bible and made it the man of their counsel, and they learnt from it what time they were afraid to trust Him, and so to shut the door on fear and to possess their own souls.