>
>
> I don't think the taboo example works. In the society of e.g. fearers of
> the rhesus monkey, the rhesus monkey is feared e.g. because it is a favored
> animal of the god Mooga-Mooga (or what have you) and so it is dangerous to
> offend it. There is thus a rational reason for the fear within the society's
> system of understanding the world. It is not a phobia any more than my fear
> of being burned alive is beingburnedaliveaphobia. Whereas my fear of heights
> is irrational within the context of my belief system.
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>
I'd say that in the context of your belief system your fear of heights is
more rational then you'd think. Even if you don't want to take Freud into
account here, Sartre's classic existential analysis of his own fear of
heights is instructive.
As for the phobia-taboo connection, I'm following Freud, but especially Lacan here. Freud's classic "Totem and Taboo" made the connection between anxiety-based symptomology and primitive belief structures - indeed he equated their functions, which was to stave off anxiety (a case I would argue for in the example of homophobia). Lacan, with the larger and more advanced volume of work on anthropology, as well as the theoretical advance of structuralism explicitly equated the two as having identical "Symbolic functions" - which basically means cultural functions.
(From the rather crappy online Lacanian wikipedia: In other words, a phobia plays exactly the same role which Claude LÈvi-Strauss assigns to myths, only on the level of the individual rather than of society. What is important in the myth, argues Lévi-Strauss, is not any 'natural' or 'archetal' meaning of the isolated elements which make it up, but the way they are combined and re-combined in such a way that while the elements change position, the relations between the positions are immutable. http://nosubject.com/Phobia)
He also postulated that the rise of individual sympotomology was due to these cultural functions becoming more transparent and less-stable. In these circumstances he reckoned that people had to create their own "individual myths". Of course, this line of thought is by no means new and stretches back at least to Nietszche, if not to Kierkegaard.
To be honest, I haven't seen an argument put forward against either Freud or Lacan in this regard, let alone one that stands up.