Hysteria (pronounced hi-ster-ee-uh (U) or hi-steer-re-ah (non-U))
(1) In casual use, an uncontrollable outburst of emotion or fear, often characterized by irrationality, laughter, weeping, etc.
(2) In psychoanalysis, a psychoneurotic disorder characterized by violent emotional outbreaks, disturbances of sensory and motor functions, and various abnormal effects due to autosuggestion.
(3) In clinical psychiatry, conversion disorder.
(4) In (historic) clinical medicine, a mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc without an organic cause (archaic).
1795-1805:
From the New Latin hysteria, from
hysteric, from Latin hystericus, from
the Ancient Greek ὑστερικός
(husterikós) (a suffering in the
uterus, hysterical), from ὑστέρα (hustéra) (womb). It’s from the same classical root that French
gained hystérie and the long-archaic
alternative English form is hysterick. Now entirely obsolete as a medical term,
hysteria is most often used as (1) a descriptor of someone behaving in an
emotionally over-wrought way (with many feminist critics noting the loaded
associations whether applied to men or women) or (2) in sociology and
psychology (as mass hysteria) to
describe a phenomenon that manifests as a collective illusion of fears in a whole
or a sub-set of a population.
Like
many terms that start with a non-silent h but have emphasis on their second
syllable, some people precede hysteric with an, others with a. Both practices are acceptable in modern
English as long as use is consistent.
Once exclusively female
For reasons both of linguistic and physiological determinism, until the nineteenth century it wasn’t possible for men to receive a diagnosis of hysteria, regardless of how hysterically they may behave. Western medicine had long accepted the Ancient Greek belief hysteria was caused by a disturbance in the uterus and thus was exclusively a condition of women; an alternative description was uterine melancholy.
While drawn from the Greek hystera (uterus), the word is not ancient, the phrase in Greek medicine being hysterical suffocation. The Greeks thought the uterus moved through the body, eventually strangling her and inducing disease, hence the tradition of centuries the disorder could exist only in women. The mysterious tarassis was suggested as a name for male hysteria but is noted by only a few sources and then as either obscure or archaic.
Late in the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud's early work with diagnosed hysterics was important in his development of psychoanalytic therapy, one patient ever calling the treatment a "talking cure" and within the profession it’s still known as “talk therapy”. It wasn’t until 1980 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) withdrew the word. In the first edition of the DSM (DSM–I (1952)) the condition was named “conversion reaction” while, in DSM–II (1968), it was grouped with dissociation disorder under the new diagnostic category of “hysterical neurosis” although, later, conversion disorder was conceptualised as a disorder of the brain associated with disordered emotions. The transition to a system that classified psychiatric disorders by clinical phenomenology rather than aetiology resulted in the elimination of “hysterical neurosis” from DSM–III (1980), supplanted by “dissociation disorders” and “conversion disorders” with the latter separated from the former and listed as a “somatoform disorder”. Thus, since 1980, somatoform disorders and the dissociative disorders have been separate categories in the DSM, the progressive nomenclature being:
1952 DSM–I Conversion
reaction
1968 DSM–II Hysterical
neurosis (conversion type)
1980 DSM–III Conversion
disorder
1992 ICD–10 Dissociative
(conversion) disorder
1994 DSM–IV Conversion
disorder
2013 DSM-5
No substantive changes, confirming symptoms once labeled under the
broad umbrella of hysteria would fit under what is now referred to as somatic
symptom disorder.
Lindsay Lohan, hysteria scene in The Canyons (2013).
