Word: hypochondria
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Combined with the culture's incessant encouragement to uncover, treat and neutralize whatever gremlins may lurk behind our brows, this built-in inner blindness can result in a sort of mental hypochondria. We give up on making fine distinctions and simply check ALL OF THE ABOVE. "It can be like medical student's disease," says Wilson, "where we think we have every new disorder." Evidence for this, he says, can be found in the fact that disorders tend to vary over different cultures and over time. In Freud's day, hysteria was all the rage--a problem experienced mostly...
...burlesque approach to Chekov's story of a marriage proposal interrupted by disputes over trivial family rivalries. Dorothy Brodesser returns in drag as the scowling father of Natalia, the woman whom Chekov's feeble hero Lomov wants to wed, and Barlow Anderson as Lomov reaches feats of physical hypochondria that defy description. Parkinson's production comes dangerously close to the line between farce and sheer Vaudeville at times. It evokes laughter from the audience, but it is more of the laughter one expects at a play by absurdist writer Christopher Durang than at the drawing-room comedies of Chekov. Love...
Gotlieb, however, shone as a true source of comic relief as August's hypochondria sister Delia, an acclaimed author with a scandalous history. Her character was supposed to be livelier than everyone else's during her scenes, and she realized her potential without being melodramatic. Neither she nor Lewis had many spoken lines, but they never tried to overshadow their fellow cast members. They slipped into their roles with a familiarity and understanding that was not reached by anyone else in the cast. Truly, Lewis's quiet but sharp one-liners and Gotlieb's outspoken, often obnoxious punch-lines brought...
...charm of De Botton's books comes from his ability to regard the oldest profession in the world (the words "I love you") with a youthful sense of playfulness and discovery. Here he offers disquisitions on the "love right angle," "psychological hypochondria" and "jollyism" and likens the self, in quick succession, to a tumble dryer, a weather pattern and a TV set. The pages of the novel are sprinkled with diagrams, floor plans of the heart and even a picture of a can of Campbell's soup-which reflect, in their way, the games and strategies we practice in love...
...daughter; Lloyd, a rotten 11-year-old son; and a useless, not-quite-divorced husband. Not all biographers have seen things this way, as McLynn admits, but he is persuasive. Fanny was 40 when they met, 10 years older than R.L.S., an artistic poseur given to spiritualism and hypochondria who tried to cut Stevenson off from his wide circle of literary friends and often acted as censor; she successfully bulldozed him into burning an offensive first draft of Dr. Jekyll...