Word: hypochondria
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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...
Cultivated Hypochondria. It was the "petite madeleine," dunked in tea and then savored, that unlocked the corridors of Proust's memory. "No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place." So in Swann's Way, the first part of his seven-volume work, did Proust begin his remembrances. Soon the past was unfolding in his pages: "And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction...
...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...
...indomitable physical zest. Repeated onslaughts of lung congestion, blood clotting and surgery reduced his body to "a ruin," according to his doctor. Yet until the end, which was attributed to arteriosclerotic heart disease, every one of his maladies seemed somewhat curable, save for his hypochondria. The remarkable features that had been caricatured by such friends as Cocteau and Picasso -bull-fiddle nose, guitar-like ears, pince-nez, natty mustache-remained mobile and alert. Stravinsky carried on with the conversational crowds he loved so well, often speaking to one guest in French, another in English, or in Russian to his wife...
...findings show that hypochondria, or "high body concern," one of the most common neuroses of the elderly, can often be cured. According to Dr. Ewald Busse, director of the Duke study center, if a man's family "keeps criticizing him unjustly, makes him feel uncomfortable, unwanted, he may retreat into an imaginary illness as a way of saying, 'Don't make things harder...