A car memoir
I developed agoraphobia and panic disorder when I was in college. There was nothing unusual about my symptoms. I had panic attacks in classrooms and in the school library and worried initially as everyone does when they develop that condition about the meaning of those symptoms. I was afraid I was going crazy. I thought I might lose control of myself and do something embarrassing, like crying out in the classroom or in any other place where I felt trapped. In time when I lost my fear of the panic attacks, I was no longer uncomfortable in any of these places. There is one symptom of a panic disorder that I never developed, however. It was the fear of driving in a car. The reason was obvious. I never drove a car. I never learned how to drive a car until long after the panic disorder was gone. Which is not to say I did not have a personal experience with cars.
Because patients with panic disorder have a special need to feel in control, they tend to have one of two different problems when they are in a car. Some people can drive comfortably but they cannot be a passenger because under those circumstances they do not feel they are in control of the car. The others can be passengers, but they feel frightened driving the car because then they might lose control of the wheel and crash the car. Both concerns grow out of a fear of losing control.
My father, who was afraid of cars, as he was of many other things, managed to express that fear in still another way. He drove very, very slowly on the yellow line so that he would not inadvertently side-swipe a parked car. I used to sit up on the back seat and look out the small window in the back of the car (there were no such things as seat-belts in those days) and stare glumly at the long line of cars stretched out behind us. When a car managed to pass us, my father shook a fist at it and cursed. He took no chances while driving. For instance, he was against having a radio in the car because it might distract him. Also, if we were proceeding up a steep street (in the Bronx) he would turn back half-way if he felt there was a chance we could not make it all the way up to the top.
I could not have been older than seven, because after that we moved to Manhattan, and we had no car. I did not learn how to drive a car until I was drafted into the army at the age of twenty-seven.
A car is not necessary to anyone living in Manhattan. It is usually an inconvenience and an encumbrance. We could not afford a car. Parking costs money. Public transportation is fine. I suppose the real reason we did not have a car, though, was the same reason I was not allowed a bicycle. It wasn’t safe. I mention these attitudes of my father, and my mother too, because they are the usual background against which phobias develop. They are expressions of an over-protective parent. Such fears were learned from their parents, and they passed them off to their children. Agoraphobia itself grows out of other similarly contagious but more primitive fears: the fear of getting lost, the fear of strangers, the fear that feelings can rise to such a level that they cannot be resisted.
And there are other such fears, including the fear of precarious health, that tend to outlast the panic disorder and agoraphobia. As a child I was dragged from one doctor to another trying to discover why I had occasional ringing in my ears in quiet rooms, or why there were little teeny excrescences on my eyelids, or some other vague physical symptom that left my various doctors sighing heavily and rolling their eyes.
Mostly, though, my parents were afraid about my being damaged in an accident. My aunt once gave me a set of roller-skates, which my mother immediately took away, telling me I could get them back when I was a good boy. I never saw them again.
Anyway, after carefully miscalculating my chances of getting drafted out of my psychiatric residency, I was posted to Germany. Plainly, I had to learn how to drive. Since I was no longer phobic, I did not have much more trouble than anyone else. I learned on an automatic shift. If anything I was more casual than I should have been. Every once in a while, my instructor grabbed the wheel of the car and reminded me that the car did not turn by itself. I had to turn the wheel. I passed my test.
It seemed reasonable, being sent to Germany, to buy a Volkswagen. I was stationed in Nuremberg and the car was delivered to Munich, which is like living in New York City and having the car delivered to Washington D. C. Also, I had learned on an automatic shift, and the Volkswagen beetle was a stick-shift.
Although I was no longer afraid of becoming panicky while driving, I was afraid of getting lost in a foreign country where I did not speak the language. And, as an ex-phobic, I still had vague, inarticulate fears being so far away from home. And, I discovered after I arrived in Munich, one is not immediately, automatically, intuitively, capable of driving a shift car. I could not get out of the automobile dealership without stalling repeatedly. At every intersection in Munich I stalled, causing great amusement to all the Germans standing around and watching. I had a big USA sticker on the car, and they were very much still an occupied nation. But I travelled home uneventfully on the Autobahn and within a day or so was driving at eighty miles an hour, like everyone else. This scary experience did not cause me to become phobic of driving.
A few months later I was called in by the commanding officer of the 20th Station Hospital, where I worked, and told that I was no longer allowed to play poker on the base. When I asked why, he told me it was because I was winning too much money. That was the way of the Army. They not only could tell you what to wear all the time, they could tell you how much money you were allowed to win playing cards. (For more bizarre stories of my time in the Army, see my novel, “Maneuvers.”)
So, a week later I found myself a passenger in a car driven by a surgeon I knew. We were heading through the snows into the Bavarian mountains to a poker game we had discovered on an obscure post. I should have become suspicious after the surgeon asked me three separate times whether I would be willing to split the deductible with him if we had an accident. As a psychiatrist, I should have taken note of that remark. But I wanted to play poker. The game went as usual, and as usual I won.
On the way back we sped along the snowy mountain roads more quickly than I thought sensible; but my friend was an experienced driver and I was not. I did not complain when we made a left turn around a street corner on the wrong side of the road. We sped along, passing some German cops in a police car. They told us after the accident that they knew we were going too fast for the conditions.
A few minutes later we were sailing along down a long mountain straight-a-way, actually sailing. I realized, when my colleague said to me calmly, “Fred, we’re in a complete skid.” And we were. The car continued straight ahead, but we began to rotate so that at one point we were going sideways. We continued to spin slowly so that we were pointing somewhere behind us, and then directly behind us.
Actually, I was not very frightened. The car had been slowing down the entire time; and there were no other cars on the road. I noticed that the speedometer said to more than fifteen miles an hour when we slammed into an abutment at the bottom of the road—much harder than I would have imagined—and then started rolling over and over down an embankment. My glasses fell off. (I was now wearing a seat belt, which had just recently been made standard on a Volvo.) When we were pried out of the car a little while later, I had suffered only a small bump on my knee. My surgeon friend was entirely intact. The car was totaled. I paid him my half of the deductible. I did not become phobic in any way because of this accident.
There were two other almost accidents while I was in Germany. Each time my wife and I were driving once again through the snow (I did not know enough to get snow tires, and, after all, I was driving a Volkswagen.) I never got stuck in the car, but on this first occasion we were coming back down a mountain from Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s favorite vacation spot. There was a lot of traffic and we were stuck right next to a cliff. When the traffic started to move, and we did too, the back of our car started to skid to the edge of the cliff, but caught directly before we went over. It happened too quickly to get frightened.
On the second occasion we were driving though beautiful late fall weather once again in the Bavarian Alps. We decided to go sight-seeing up a small mountain road. After about ten minutes it began to snow. And then to snow heavily. The road began to narrow; and the visibility began to shrink. I could not see cars, if there were any, coming down on the other side of the road. And there was no place to turn around. We went inexorably higher and higher. On this occasion, I had plenty of time to become frightened. In the end though, we did turn around and come down again.
None of these incidents caused me to hesitate to get in the car again. And I certainly did not become phobic. Contrary to what most people think, most phobias for automobiles do not appear as a consequence of an accident or a near accident. Agoraphobia has to do with the fear of losing control. It is a learned fear. Phobic parents teach their children to be phobic. I try to explain to my phobic patients that their children either become compliant and phobic themselves, or defiant, which may not be a desirable way of protesting. I suppose I became defiant. I always listen to the radio when I am in the car. (c) Fredric Neuman 2013