Opposites

First off:
What is the opposite of fear?
What is the opposite of peace?






I remembered something I read a while back. It was a book of phobias (pleasant reading yeah) and the last short story was about a boy who went from being afraid of nothing to being panophobic.

This guy got offered a full scholarship and free boarding at a private school, and after spending a day there, he realised that everybody else in the school has a phobia which prevents them from mixing with normal kids. For example, one girl is terrified of metal cutlery and another has a phobia of bugs.

Also, every time one of the kids touch him, he gets their phobia and they are cured (but he doesn't find that out until the end).

Irritated and unsympathetic, the guy goes to the headmistress because he wants to leave the school. The headmistress agrees, but only if and when he answers the question, "What is the opposite of fear?"
Obviously, the boy says, it's courage.
But the headmistress says something along the lines of, "No, courage is merely something you can feel in the absence of fear" and then takes out a box. She opens the box and there is a beetle in it.

The guy had already been touched by the bug-o-phobic and so he had become a bug-o-phobic. So he was terrified and almost fainting until the headmistress squished the beetle, at which point he felt an overwhelming sense of calm, relief and serenity.

"Now, what is the opposite of fear?"
"Peace. The opposite of fear is peace."

(The headmistress then tells him that he is the chosen one and his parents signed over their guardian rights to the school so he can't leave.)

What do you think? I always thought that if something is there in the absence of something else then they are opposites, e.g. darkness in absence of light.