Why is someone afraid of flying? What is the reason for the fact that he does not dare to get on a plane or why he sits in his seat shaking with nerves? Psychoanalysis has been looking for explanations for some time. Freud was the first to pay attention to it and develop a theory.
Icarus
The myth of Icarus is one of those stories that underlie our views on flight. Together with his father Daedalus, he made wings from wood and bird feathers glued together with wax. While his father made it through the flight unscathed, Icarus, despite his father’s warnings, flew so high that the sun’s rays melted the wax and he crashed.
This myth is seen as man’s desire to fly and Icarus, as a symbol of humanity, is said to have made the first attempt to do so. However, flying is considered something not inherent to man. If he does attempt to do so, he is, as it were, challenging God or the gods. Failure would then be inevitable as man can never succeed in attaining the status of God.
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis has tried to find a number of explanations for the fear of flying. Sigmund Freud, for example, talks about it, but he uses the dream for this. According to Freud, man’s desire to fly has its origins in the flying games he played as a child. Everyone has experienced being lifted up by their father, making you float in the air and then pretending that you were going to fall.
Freud connected the symbols found in dreams with sexuality. The memory of those flying games would excite people just like having sex. Modern psychoanalysts believe that this excitement also occurs while flying. Anyone who has a fear of flying would also have a fear of sex , two fears that originated in childhood.
Parting
Some psychoanalysts see flying as leaving Earth, a kind of separation. Just like you say goodbye to family and friends when you travel. This separation could be the cause of fear of flying for some people. This interpretation would also have to do with childhood, when the child was separated from the mother for the first time when it wanted to explore the world. Depending on the mother’s reaction, this will continue to live on in the child as a positive or negative experience.
The shift
Another theory relies on the shift. What it comes down to is that one actually shifts one’s fear of something specific to something else that originally has nothing to do with the basic fear. Freud gives the example of the boy Hans who is afraid of his father, but this shifts to horses that would like to bite him. Something similar would occur with a fear of flying, so that the person in question is actually afraid of something that has nothing to do with flying at all.
Besides the psychoanalytic explanations, there are also medical explanations. You can read that here.