Spirit of the Dead Watching her fear. Mathews says it is too simple to attribute Tehura's terror to her belief in spirits and irrational fear of the dark; she says, following Sweetman, that Gauguin's sexual predilections should not be ignored when trying to understand the work. Rather, she suggests the girl's fear was a response to Gauguin's aggressive behavior, consistent with his known battering (so says Mathews) of his wife Mette, the submissive fear in her eyes his erotic reward. Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of Art History at Northwestern University, suggests the painting and its narrative is "a veritable encyclopaedia of colonial racism and misogyny".
Fear of fish Fear of fish Fear of fish or ichthyophobia ranges from cultural phenomena such as fear of eating fish, fear of touching raw fish, or fear of dead fish, up to irrational fear (specific phobia). Galeophobia is the fear specifically of sharks. Ichthyophobia is described in "Psychology: An International Perspective" as an "unusual" specific phobia. Both symptoms and remedies of ichthyophobia are common to most specific phobias. John B. Watson, a renowned name in behaviorism, describes an example, quoted in many books in psychology, of conditioned fear of a goldfish in an infant and a way of unconditioning of the fear