Doraphobia

[Doraphobia]

**Doraphobia,** or **muscular neurosis** (ancient Greek δῶρα - gift, phόβος - fear) is a type of circular phobia in the form of an irrational fear of any touch, in which a person experiences aversion to the touch of people and subjects. This obsessive phobia was originally described by Huthe (1907) as the expression of an involuntary form of paranoia, as the patient fears all touch, because he perceives it as a manifestation of the hidden intention of other people to harm him. Such sensations are sometimes mistaken for manifestations of schizophrenia. Especially often, the victims of doraphobia were mistaken for the rarity, unusualness and anxiety of their manifestations by the psychiatrists of that time, who tried to explain the phobia as delusional ideas, as various functional psychoses. Subjects with doraphobia even previously described: “I feel a particularly disgusting something; someone touching me gives me the impression that someone's hand is resting on my chest... As soon as someone walks along my back and then puts their hand on my head, when I sit, I clench convulsively. I know that this phobia is not of organic origin,” and therefore, in their opinion, is caused by hypnosis. At the same time, doraphobic disorders are based on a complex set of symptoms reflecting complex pathogenic and decompensation mechanisms, most often against the background of an asthenic constitution and, possibly, the body’s predisposition to some somatic pathology, provoking, within the framework of doraphobia, the constitutional development of the body’s reaction