word-association or antonymy

I am far from sure that the semantics of opposites are a universal conception, ubiquitous across most languages—maybe big and little or long and short are passable everywhere but dog and cat or cat and mouse or even good and evil are not acceptable answers elsewhere. Maybe there is not always a real and handy word to express the idea of an opposite, though the concept is understood.
Doubleplusungood, or Penelope weaving and unweaving as she waits for Odysseus to return. There are too very fancy kinds of operative opposites, like hyperbole and its countermand litotes, exaggeration and understatement—though the same terms are not employed in the study of conics. Recently, I came across another pairing that I liked, although I am not sure quite satisfies the definition: phobia and soteria (φοβός και σωτηρία, the root of salvation). This is taken not only in the sense of the duality between fear and calm, but rather with the difference between almost clinical morbidity and paralysis and relief and the saving-grace called deliverance, being not afraid in proportion with the disproportionate aversion that the phobia represents. Not everyone has an unsalvageable disliking of specifically spiders and snakes nor generally of crowds or the great outdoors, but I think there would be in a clinical definition, should psychology care for what’s right and not just what’s wrong, of soteria complementary gradations of relief and unfear.