Word: hypochondria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...oldsters "can pass days in endlessly doing nothing, feeling that there is nothing to do." Besides, the two groups are often alike in being "intensely self-absorbed"; in fact, "the narcissism of old age and the narcissism of adolescence are two peaks in the development of human egotism." Hypochondria, too, can peak in adolescence as well as old age-which Anthony says "is not surprising because, in both, profound bodily alterations are taking place." Frequent changes in self-reliance also occur in old and in young; both alternate between battling for independence and leaning excessively on others...
...camp. The sudden illness separates him from an ardently admiring young friend and sends him home to be nursed by Mama. The doctor's prescription, conveniently enough, is a rest-cure at Bourbon Les Bains, a typically French resort for the well-to-do where the guests nurse their hypochondria with daily doses of mineral water and gossip. At the baths, Mother's attempts at strict motherliness break down under close quarters, and Laurent asserts his maturity by taking on the role of her public escort. His pride is deflated when she leaves him for a two-day stay with...
...cosmopolitan, one black, one hardhat) lights into a subject. Last week it was sex, and most of the gags were past their prime. The premiere the previous week took on health and, without drawing much blood, did at least pink such vulnerable targets as Americans' hypochondria, overcrowded waiting rooms, and the inadequacies of health insurance ("At today's prices, the only one who can afford to be sick is Howard Hughes"). The program's interlocutor, Gene Kelly, did not dance, and his material did not sing. Most of the sting in the first two weeks came from...
Spiritual Hypochondria. Greene's first published novel, The Man Within, created an archetypal Greene character, the divided man, naturally weak and self-dramatizing, whose other self heavily corrects toward courage and understatement. In A Sort of Life, Greene suggests that this split personality runs through his whole family. It certainly shows in the book. But what provides fascinating ambiguity in fiction is merely troublesome in personal autobiography. Despite his deliberately quiet voice, there is something unconvincingly stagy about Greene's spiritual hypochondria, and about his insistence on the personal angst and failure that he has endured...
...gray house of his Aunt Elisabeth Amiot (called Tante Léonie in the novel) stands just two blocks from the pastry shop. On the second floor is the bedroom where she cultivated her hypochondria to the point of becoming a bedridden invalid for 20 years. Later, her nephew emulated her example: writing feverishly at night (he practically existed on café au lait), sleeping during the day (with the aid of veronal), Proust rarely left his bed in a cork-lined Paris room during the last 15 years of his life. On Aunt Elisabeth's bedside table, gracing...