Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...attack on the rights of a political minority. It is our opinion that such attacks--and they have been many in recent months--are a grave threat to the free institutions of American democracy. We believe that these attacks should be attributed to the current well-planned campaign of hysteria aimed at all progressives, and not primarily to the misled individuals who in many cases carry them out. This hysteria has certainly been heightened by the indictment of the twelve leaders of the Communist Party on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government by force and violence...
Last spring, Western Europeans criticized the U.S. for its "war hysteria." Recently, however, observers who have sampled European opinion have found a growing tendency to face the possibility of war. Much of the war talk was still simply an expression of fear; many people, feeling cynically certain that the catastrophe was inevitable, had no notion of doing anything to prevent war, or to win "it, if it came...
...called hypnotism, has been called a faker. More likely, some modern psychiatrists think, he was a stupid man who blundered into an idea too big for him: the phenomena of suggestion and suggestibility. A Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, demonstrated that hypnotism could both arouse and quiet symptoms of hysteria. Charcot also bid for fame as the teacher of a Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud (rhymes with overjoyed...
psychoneurosis (or neurosis). A form of mental disease, characterized by conflicting emotions and bad adjustment to environment. Symptoms: nervousness, attacks of anxiety, hysteria, depression, fatigue...
...written by a man under a deep spell, as if Caldwell himself were aware that something was the matter, and simply did not know what to do about it. Its prose has the glassy, elaborately monotonous decor of the language of hypnosis, beneath which the reader can sense the hysteria of someone trying to re-establish communication with the world. In what is obviously a rigorous act of will rather than the product of a freely flowing imagination, Caldwell puts his characters through his standard novelistic paces without once indicating what motivating idea or feeling can possibly be behind them...