hysteria
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: human-sciences
medicine
psychiatry
psychology
psychopathology
sciences
Etymology: From New Latin hysteria, a back-formation from Latin hystericus, from Ancient Greek ὑστερικός (husterikós, “suffering in the uterus, hysterical”), from ὑστέρα (hustéra, “womb”). Compare French hystérie.
Inflected forms:
form: hysterias
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: hysteriae
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: hysteriæ
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotions, in a wide range from joy to panic but usually including anxiety or fear.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
usually
examples: Zinoviev was unwell and feverish. He was told he was to be transferred to another cell. But when he saw the guards he at once understood. All accounts agree that he collapsed, yelling in a high-pitched voice a desperate appeal to Stalin to keep his word. He gave the impression of hysteria, but this is probably not fair, as his voice was always very piercing when he was excited, and he was perhaps trying to make a last speech. He was, in addition, still suffering from heart and liver trouble, so that some sort of collapse is understandable.
At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted country folk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap.
gloss: A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
usually
examples: The typical cases of hysteria cited by Freud thus involved a moral conflict—a conflict about what the young women in question wanted to do with themselves. Did they want to prove that they were good daughters by taking care of their sick fathers? Or did they want to become independent of their parents, by having a family of their own, or in some other way? I believe it was the tension between these conflicting aspirations that was the crucial issue in these cases. The sexual problem—say, of the daughter's incestuous cravings for her father—was secondary (if that important); it was stimulated, perhaps, by the interpersonal situation in which the one had to attend to the other's body. Moreover, it was probably easier to admit the sexual problem to consciousness and to worry about it than to raise the ethical problem indicated. In the final analysis, the latter is a vastly difficult problem in living. It cannot be "solved" by any particular maneuver but requires rather decision making about basic goals, and, having made the decisions, dedicated efforts to attain them.
gloss: Synonym of conversion disorder.
pos: noun
tags: informal
uncountable
usually
gloss: Any disorder of women with some psychiatric symptoms without other diagnosis, ascribed to uterine influences on the female body, lack of pregnancy, or lack of sex.
pos: noun
tags: historical
obsolete
uncountable
usually
Related words: hysteric
hysterics
hysterical
Derived words: anxiety hysteria
Arctic hysteria
canine hysteria
conversion hysteria
ecohysteria
female hysteria
homohysteria
hystero-
mass hysteria
Translations:
lang: Bulgarian
word: исте́рия
roman: istérija
lang: Catalan
word: histèria
lang: Chinese Mandarin
word: 癔病
roman: yìbìng
lang: Finnish
word: hysteria
lang: Norman
word: maladie malinne
lang: Russian
word: истери́я
roman: isteríja
lang: Sinhalese
word: මායා රෝගය
roman: māyā rōgaya
lang: Tajik
word: зиён
roman: ziyon
lang: Tajik
word: ғаш
roman: ġaš
lang: Tajik
word: ҷунун
roman: junun