Belling the Cat

Many people are afraid of cats or dislike them, but Mrs. A. was an extreme case. At 37 she was sent to suburban London's Bethlem Royal Hospital because her cat phobia was running and ruining her life. She told the hospital psychiatrists that her father had drowned a kitten before her eyes when she was four. After that, as a child, the fear that the family cat might brush against her was enough to make her sit stiff at table with legs stretched straight out in the air. She screamed if she saw a cat on the doorstep.

As a World War II "Wren" (Women's Royal Naval Service), she insisted on sleeping in a top bunk.

Recently the house next door to Mrs. A.'s stood empty for months, and the neighborhood cats made its overgrown garden their playground. Afraid that they might spring at her, she was frightened when she had to hang out her laundry.

She took to walking on the outside edge of the sidewalk, and refused to go out alone at night. If she visited friends who had a cat, her husband or children went into the house first to make sure the cat was put out of the parlor. Mrs. A. could not wear fur-lined gloves, or touch rabbit fur (too much like a cat's), or ride in buses or subways where a woman in a fur coat might sit next to her. In her own home she kept up a fury of activity in an effort to avoid thinking of cats. She bit her nails to the vanishing point.

Velvet & Glove. Psychiatrist Hugh L. Freeman and Psychologist Donald C. Kendrick were convinced that such phobias usually are a cover-up for some deeper emotional problem. In this case it looked as though Mrs. A.'s trouble had been suppressed hatred of her rigid, tyrannical father, which had been made vivid by the kitten-drowning incident.

The therapists decided to try a newfangled treatment based on a complicated technical system called '"behavior therapy." First they explained their plan to Mrs. A., and she, anxious to be cured, agreed to it. Freeman offered her a piece of smooth velvet to stroke--faintly reminiscent of cat fur, but not so like it as to arouse her phobia. Next, a fabric with heavier pile. Then a glove of rabbit fur. At first this so upset Mrs. A. that she had to wrap it hastily in newspaper, but another patient encouraged her by wearing it. and eventually she brought herself to stroke it. Next she put up pictures of cats around the house, and soon became accustomed to them. Within three weeks she could handle catlike fur and toys, and could walk within ten yards of a live tabby.

Great Day. The real test came with a kitten chosen for its placidity. A nurse held it in her lap. Mrs. A. stroked it. At last she took it in her own lap, and burst into tears--not from distress, but from the joy of conquest. "One of the greatest days of my life," she called it.

After that, it was plain sailing. Mrs. A. took the kitten home, and as it grew, she got used to cats. She stopped walking on the edge of the sidewalk, stopped having cat nightmares, even had pleasant dreams of kittens. Then her dreams took a different turn: in them she violently counterattacked her domineering father. Somehow, report the therapists, this resolved some conflict in her unconscious. Mrs. A. stopped her frantic busying around the house and, for the first time since childhood, has stopped biting her nails. A year after beginning treatment, the therapists report in the British Medical Journal, Mrs. A. shows no sign of developing another phobia to replace the one she lost.

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