Phraseological units present great interest for linguacultural studies as they reveal the worldview of the people speaking a given language. The present article is an attempt to apply the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor to the analysis of idiomatic phraseological units of the Romanian and English languages. It has already been established that most of the idioms reflect in their form some cultural and historical information that is known to the native bearers of the language. At the same time, we believe that there is a group of idioms that can be analysed taking into account the conceptual metaphor that is of a universal nature. To this end, the notion of cognitive analysis will be introduced and finally, we will carry out a comparative culture-oriented analysis of English and Romanian phraseological units denoting ‘fear’ trying to identify the conceptual metaphor underlying the idiom.