Counterphobia

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A compulsion to seek out the causes of fear or anxiety instead of avoiding them. countable, uncountable

    "Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon's polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television […]"

Example

More examples

"Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon's polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television […]"

Etymology

From counter- + phobia.

More for "counterphobia"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.