hysteria (Hysterie)
A widely used term to designate pathological symptoms of either a physical or psychical nature for which no physiological cause is apparent. Hysteria in this sense is often used as a pejorative for an imagined illness. The word is derived from âhysteraâ, the Greek word for âuterusâ or âwombâ, and has its origin in the idea current in ancient Egypt as well as classical Greece and Rome that the female reproductive organ is able to move throughout the body and that this movement is triggered by an unsatisfied longing for a child. For this reason, at least until the middle part of the nineteenth-century hysteria was thought to be an exclusively âfemale maladyâ (as it was commonly referred to in the Victorian era). Inspired by the great French neurologist, Jean Charcot, Freud, Sigmund became interested in hysteria, and in the course of the development of psychoanalysis he proposed an aetiology which starts from the premise that hysteria is the product of psychical conflict between thoughts generated in the unconscious and the censor protecting the conscious. He identified two types of hysteria: (i) conversion hysteria, in which this conflict is expressed in bodily symptoms; (ii) anxiety hysteria, in which the conflict is deflected onto an object, manifesting as a phobia (e.g. fear of spiders).