The Fear of Fear of Fear

This article examines the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear (1975), a film that falls in the middle period of the director’s startlingly short but highly prolific thirteen-year film career. It was among the many made-for-television films that he produced and directed in that period, and it was thus intended to reach a broad audience, but its controversial positions landed far afield from most contemporaneous feminist standpoints. For example, the film mirrored how mainstream psychoanalysis from that era sometimes denigrated pathological behaviors in women as mere symptoms or side-effects of cultural norms. This article explores how these stakes are dramatized in Fear of Fear, looking specifically at Margit Carstensen’s performance in the film, as well as at Fassbinder’s own engagement with psychoanalysis, aiming to contextualize the many complications that vexed the film’s critical and public receptions.