Susanna Berti Franceschi

The Archetypes of Fear Susanna Berti Franceschi

It is through fear that we learn to recognise danger and we develop strategies of prevention in order to avoid danger. As humans, we relate the emotion of fear first to memory, and then to our own hypothesis of danger.

In this brief dissertation on fear, we might say that there exist both fears as old as man, as well as collective fears relating to more recent events in human history. One such example, which is today both extremely widespread and a source of collective anxiety, is the fear of the end of the world and of the effect on humanity of nuclear and natural disasters.

But fears also speak of more than just the human condition: they tell of love, of memory, of nostalgia, of marginalisation and the sense of being different. For I believe that to truly understand man, one must also know his fears.