Not to my knowledge, however they may be treated. This is kinda like slowly building up a resistance to a poison. It's not good for you, but you can do it.

Yes, phobias can be cured. Three methods come to mind. 1) NLP 2) EFT 3) Hypnosis There have been quite a few demonstrations of curing people of phobias in minutes before live audience with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). In fact, Tony Robbins got his start by giving live demonstrations of curing people of phobias on stage using NLP using what's referred to as "The 5 minute phobia cure". It takes the emotional charge off of the images and memories a person has in their mind and leaves them in a neutral place. Some people who have experienced this were very surprised when the faced the object they feared again, such as snakes or tarantulas, and found they no longer had their fear and could actually interact with the object they were previously petrified of. Here's Elliot Ward curing 3 different individuals from 3 separate phobias - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU_Gt0ihsmU EFT is the acronym for Emotional Freedom Technique. Essentially it is tapping the same energy meridian points that are used in acupuncture to discharge energy blocks from ones system. The number of people worldwide who are finding results with this simple technique is amazing and growing. You can find more info on this here - http://www.emofree.com/ Lastly, hypnosis can retrain your subconsious to no longer associate fear to the object of ones phobia. It is retraining ones mental thought habits and imagery and generally takes between 30 - 60 days of daily listening to be effective, but it does work, depending on the quality of the suggestions and suggestibility the hypnotist is able to induce. You can find lots of hypnosis sessions for download here, and they're very inexpensive too - http://www.hypnosisdownloads.com/