Fear has no place in adult life: it is useless and even dangerous, according to US psychiatrist and former Yale professor Harvey Wasserman, MD. Yet we can learn not to fear.

People will be encouraged to understand and face their fears, and move to overcome them, at a workshop he is hosting in Galway this weekend. Wasserman sees the workshop as only the first stage in a concentrated campaign to reduce fear in Irish life, a campaign that could have worldwide impact.

"It's not that the Irish are different," Wasserman says. "Perhaps their sources of fear are different, but all peoples have fear. It's originally an adaptive survival mechanism of childhood that grows dysfunctional. It has no rightful place in adult life. If we could decrease fear by even 10 per cent, it could make an enormous difference in our lives."

The debilitating effect of fear is clearly demonstrated in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in New York. Here had been a nation invincible, untouchable, unreachable, the only superpower - people renowned for their confidence and their readiness to achieve. Now they won't fly, won't travel abroad, are quitting their skyscraper offices, are scared to congregate, are frightened of dark-skinned people, have at times turned on Muslims, have closed down their Congress for a period, and now cannot even bring themselves to open envelopes.

In other words, fear can be crippling. "Once you're frightened," Wasserman says, "you function in a far more limited way. You become dysfunctional."

He believes the September 11th attacks had a more sinister goal than merely taking life or depriving New York of its skyline: "It was to render America dysfunctional through fear. And it has succeeded so far. What President Bush says is true - we must find a way to operate in the face of fear.

"And bin Laden has publicly said he is going to make sure that Americans will never again know peace, but know only fear."

However, what happened to New York is merely one terrible instance of a worldwide reality: fear has always been with us and has always limited and crippled us.

"Yet I maintain there are no fearful things out there," Wasserman insists. "There are dangerous things, yes. Terrible things, yes. Bad things, yes. But what we need is not fear - what we need is awareness, information, judgment and the ability to take action.

"In truth there is nothing to be afraid of - there are things to be dealt with, but that's different. However, being able to live this out in our lives is difficult and requires work. And that's what this workshop is about."

More than 400 people attended Wasserman's last series of self-help lectures in Galway each week. He is now dedicated to eliminating or reducing the fears that affect the lives of so many. Fear comes in many guises, he says - the fear of annihilation, the fear of the hereafter, the fear of abandonment, of loss, of change, of the unknown, of humiliation, even of embarrassment. Then there is the fear of failure - and, surprisingly, the fear of success.

"Indeed one of the worst fears can be the fear of success," Wasserman says. "It's what holds us back from so many achievements - we actually cling to mediocrity because it's less threatening. It's the fear of flying too high. We might fall harder."

When fear is exaggerated makes us dysfunctional, self esteem plummets, creativity withers, and we become petrified - which means, literally, like stone.

"Fear in our personal lives brings everything from hypochondria to broken marriages, fundamentalism, religious mania and business failure. Fear within communities brings racism, hatred, civil conflict, war, terrorism, massacre. Most of what happens in Northern Ireland has fear at the root of it."

Fear is also deliberately fostered by people who attempt to control us, Wasserman says. "The office bully thrives on the fear he or she engenders. Certain religions keep control of their members by fostering fear. And dictators like Saddam [Hussein] maintain themselves by fear."

There is nothing new under the sun: the ancient Roman poet Accius wrote, "Let them hate me, provided they fear me".

Wasserman is astonished at how little attention psychologists have paid to the elimination of fear. There have been a few attempts, such as counter-phobia ("Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway"), but so far, he says, they are only partial and primitive solutions. Indeed "doing it anyway" could lead to trouble if there were genuine grounds for the fear.

Wasserman is pioneering hitherto untried approaches to dealing with fear. Some of these concepts and exercises he will be introducing for the first time at this weekend's workshop in Galway. "We can learn not to fear," he says.

A medical doctor of Russian, Jewish and Polish ancestry, Harvey Wasserman qualified as a psychiatrist at the prestigious Menninger School in Kansas.

He later founded the Gestalt Institute of Connecticut, where he taught advanced therapeutic techniques to practising psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and therapists. For 15 years he was assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University College of Medicine, as well as director of psychiatric education and training at Yale's clinical teaching hospital (the West Haven Veterans' Administration Hospital). In his Galway clinic, he favours the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, seeing it as ideally suitable to the highly individualistic Irish.

However, he moves beyond clinics at every opportunity. He has studied and worked with native healers in Senegal, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Australia, New Guinea and the Amazon region. In South Dakota, he worked with Sioux medicine men, and at North Hudson Bay with the Inuit. During all this he gradually moved from atheism to a profound conviction of God's existence.

When he retired about 10 years ago, he and his wife Sarah decided to settle in the Burren in Co Clare. They now live where rocks balance precariously since the Ice Age, and where foxes come to the back door to take food from their hands.

"Life comes into perspective amid all this," Wasserman says. "We have found a peace that is almost a religious experience. I keep remembering what John Muir said about Yosemite, that the salvation of mankind lies in the wilderness."

But there was to be no retirement: people started beating a path to his door. Finally he gave in and opened a psychotherapy clinic in Galway and started organising workshops.

Dr Wasserman's workshop, An End to Fear, takes place tomorrow and Sunday at the Atlanta Hotel, Galway. He is also running a workshop in Dublin on November 17th and 18th. He can be contacted at 091-566 712, and 065-708 9189.

David Rice directs the Killaloe Hedge-School of Writing, where he runs writing workshops for beginners. Workshops include Essential Writing Skills; Starting Your Novel; Writing a Non-Fiction Book; Writing for Magazines and Newspapers; and Writing Your Life Story. His five books include Song of Tiananmen Square and Shattered Vows. He can be contacted at 061-375217 or khs@killaloe.ie