Word: hypochondria
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Today, if the novel and the stage are dominated by any one theme, it is the psychology of alienation, in which human crisis is explained not by a single case history but by a sort of cosmic hypochondria, a feeling of universal futility. This trend seems to be reflected in clinical experience. The old compulsion neuroses and guilt feelings, many psychologists report, are being replaced by diffuse anxiety neuroses and a vague sense of meaninglessness. According to Chicago Psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, the new fashion in popular psychology "reflects a greater interest in social interrelationships-it's more outward...
...kind. To blunt the pain of reality, he slips a whisky bottle into his desk and nips at it. (Alcoholism climbs a steep 50% in the 40-60 group over ages 30-39.) His medicine cabinet begins to look like a pharmaceutical display, and he retreats into hypochondria. Indeed, the sense of being straitjacketed by fate may contribute sizably to the cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary attacks that increasingly fell middle-agers...
...tense and overwound. He refuses to fly, cannot rest on trains. His fee rises from $500 to $3,000 per concert; he works only six months a year and never gives more than two concerts a week. Still, the springs keep tightening, the stomach keeps churning. Hypochondria becomes real illness. There is an injured finger, tonsillitis, flu, a stomach ailment-then, abruptly, the spring breaks, the mechanism winds down, the long pyrotechnics stop short. Horowitz takes a vacation. The vacation becomes a sabbatical, the sabbatical a leave of absence, the leave an adieu...
Brady's 5,000,000 outpatients- a figure reflecting the combined circulation of his 80 papers-get a solid dose of oldfangled, no-nonsense medical advice. He is against TV patent-medicine commercials, toothpaste (he uses soap and a birch toothpick), cigarettes, alcohol and hypochondria. "What is my blood pressure advice?" he once asked his readers, and capitalized his answer "NEVER MIND YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE." In a column on the benefits of exercise, he scolded sloths: "Don't just sit on your ischial tuberosities, watching hired professionals play...
...sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only one who keeps the family together...