Scarecrow- Swapping Fears

  As the prominent psychologist Dr. Jonathan Crane, his job had been to help people rid themselves of their deepest fears. He reasoned that fear kept people from becoming their best, and by minimizing those dark terrors, an individual could achieve peace.

  Crane spent years researching fears—why people had them, how they manifested and grew stronger, and finally, when he learned everything he believed he needed to, he began to experiment on how to eliminate them.

  Over time he came to believe that to fight fear one needed to create and instill a substitute fear. Firemen fought fires by building a firewall to prevent the bigger blaze from moving forward. Doctors fought many diseases by injecting their patients with small doses in order to build the antibodies necessary to resist the main infection. He believed if one substituted a lesser, more governable fear, it could replace the overpowering dreads that paralyzed his patients.

  And it worked.

  He replaced nyctophobia—the fear of the night and darkness, a phobia that crippled so many of his patients every day when the sun went down—with hydrophobophobia, the very rational fear of contracting rabies. He replaced arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, with syphilophobia, the avoidable fear of contracting syphilis.

  There were thousands of such fears that could be substituted with thousands of others far easier to treat, and less likely to arise for a person living a reasonably normal life. One could, he realized, avoid almost all situations that generated taurophobia, the fear of bulls, much easier than selenophobia, the fear of the moon.

  But with each success, Crane began to relish the godlike ability to enter a patient’s mind and to take it over, rebuilding their response mechanisms from the ground up, changing the very way they reacted to the world around them. He enjoyed watching his patients respond to a new series of phobias, and he began to believe that people deserved the fears they sought to eliminate. If they were good people, after all, there’d be no reason to fear anything.

- Batman: Arkham Knight, chapter 7