Phobias & Manias

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

History Hit

Society, Sex, Scandal, Education, History

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What did Salvador Dali, Elizabeth I and Sigmund Freud have in common? They all had phobias, and it's possible you do too.

As ‘normal’ as you might consider yourself to be, it is highly likely that you have an irrational streak. Phobias and manias are very common, and we have a lot of names for them.

In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, Kate is joined by Kate Summerscale. Find out when we started naming our fears and compulsions, why kleptomania is mainly associated with affluent women, and what Founding Father of the United States of America, Benjamin Rush, has to do with all this.

Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.

Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my lovely petrixtas, this is Kate Lister jumping in with your fair dues warning.
0:04.4	What is a fair dues warning, Kate? Well, I will tell you.
0:07.2	A fair dues warning is me giving you fair dues that this episode is going to contain some
0:12.0	adult themes, lots of naughty words. It's not a rude one, although inevitably we're
0:17.8	wandering in that area, but we're talking about phobias today. And there might be people
0:23.0	listening to this who just they just cannot be doing with mentions of clowns and spiders and
0:29.1	heights or buttons or you're not the list is endless, it could be anything. But if you're
0:33.2	somebody that has got a phobia and just doesn't fancy listening to this one because it's going to
0:37.0	put your teeth on edge, maybe you've got a phobia of teeth, then you can just give this one a swerve.
0:41.1	Absolutely no problem at all and I'll catch you next time.
0:45.9	What gives you the creepy crawlies? Is it actually creepy crawlies because spiders is a big one? Or
0:51.4	maybe it's clowns? Or is it heights, open spaces, enclosed spaces? Did the list is endless of
0:59.2	things that people can be very, very scared of? But we're not really talking about things that
1:04.6	just put you on edge today. We're talking about full-blown phobias, real, fear-inducing, heart-stopping,
1:12.2	life-destroying phobias. And we're also talking about manias which are slightly different.
1:17.6	Manias are things that make your heart race in a very different way to a phobia,
1:21.7	something that you are obsessed with to the point of dangerous. Perhaps it's a band that you follow
1:27.3	or perhaps you feel an urge to steal a lipstick or something that you could afford to pay for yourself.
1:32.8	Or maybe you were just one of the many people that remodels to your house for a tulip bulb,
1:37.3	real story, we'll get to that. But today but Twix the Sheets, we are going to find out where our phobias
1:43.0	and manias come from.
2:13.4	Hello and welcome back to Bitwix the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society,
	...

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