What Are Germaphobes Really Scared Of?

It is tempting to have a laugh at germaphobes. Look at them cleaning the handle of the oven with powerful bleach for the seventh time. Or falling over trying to open the bathroom door with their foot and their scarf. Or scrambling for their shoes to cross the hotel room floor or trying to edge their passport into a plastic bag for later fumigation after it was lightly touched by the immigration official.

Some of our mirthful disdain comes from a sense that the germaphobe isn’t being honest with themselves or the world. Something is up but it can’t possibly be what they claim: door handles and handshakes simply aren’t that risky. In other words, we sense, perhaps rightly but with harshness, that the idea of a ‘germ’ has come to stand in for something else, that it’s a cover for some other concern hovering just off stage. They may be scrubbing away trying to expunge something; it’s just not what they tell us it is.

But, to extend compassion, what might the germaphobe essentially and unconsciously be worried about if it isn’t germs themselves? Three fears can be said to haunt them. A fear of their own unacceptable sides. A fear of infringement by other people. And a fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable.

In the past of many germaphobes, there was likely to have been a parent who could not accept the full reality of the person they had brought into the world. Everything that was less than pristine had to be censored. There would have been constant reminders to stay clean, a lot of anxiety around the potty and flinches every time the child came in from the garden to the parent for a hug. From this, the child would have derived a subtle sense that there was something _ quite what might have been unclear _ unclean and unacceptable about them, something that could not be borne by their caregivers, sides of their nature that had to remain under wraps or exiled lest the child be abandoned or labelled abhorrent. In their constant efforts to rid themselves of germs and expel contaminants, we can read an ongoing attempt to prove their own loveability and good nature to a rejecting punitive internalised parental figure.

Germaphobia is also likely to hint at past invasion, not by microbes, but by people who didn’t respect boundaries; who disturbed the germaphobe’s mind or touched their body, who went where they shouldn’t have done and upset the due order of things. Germs stand in for everything that wasn’t originally in the right place, for what ruined purity, for those who didn’t listen to a ‘no’.

In germaphobia, we glimpse too a terror at unpredictability. Dirt in the wrong place stands as an emblem of everything that might happen when it shouldn’t; it is a death, a departure, a divorce, an outrage. One tidies and tidies to keep a tenuous hold on fragile order in an overwhelming chaotic unbounded world.

The tribulations of germaphobes should be a conduit for gratitude at our own relative good fortune. If we don’t need to aggressively ward off the less than clean sides of us, if we can bear a little ‘dirt’, if it’s fine to leave a few used dishes by the sink overnight, it is because someone early on was generous enough to accept the less than pristine sides of our natures, psychological as much as physical. They were not disgusted by us – so that we, in turn, now have no need to be disgusted by ourselves. Stability and sanity aren’t threatened by a finger mark or a dirty glass because they existed sufficiently strongly at the start and promise to continue to do so into the future.

Germaphobes aren’t ever really responding to dirt; rather to an absence of love and safety. Once we have finished mocking them for their cleanliness, we can take pity on them for their pain.