Word: hysteria
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...interesting time to go. In the midtwenties, you can't imagine how safe life seemed. My father had been at the war, but I had never thought any thing might happen to him. At Berlin, I realized the foundations were shaking." And at Berlin, surrounded by the hysteria, madness, and mission that culminated in Adolf Hitler, Auden wrote extraordinary poetry, and people noticed. The people included T. S. Eliot, who, as an editor at Faber and Faber, published Auden's first book. And so, Auden's career began...
...possibility of doing so. In 1937 when he resolved to leave the Party-in the middle of the Moscow purges-he had come to regard Communism as an absolute evil. But he placed little hope in the U.S. or the European democracies either. How could he? Fascism, despair, hysteria, exploitation, economic anguish, war and the threat of war-all those things that Marx had taught him would herald the destruction of capitalism were all about him. What fell from Chambers, as he explained, was not merely Communism but "the whole web of the materialist modern mind-the luminous shroud which...
...psychiatrists who have combed the voluminous records of the Royal Free outbreak and more than a dozen like it that have been reported recently. In fact, they suggest in the British Medical Journal, the outbreak was a classic case of mass hysteria. It falls into the same category as the dancing manias of Germany in the Middle Ages or the Neapolitans' tarantella...
...thing, none of the victims died or even had a high fever, a most unlikely finding in an infectious epidemic. The known presence of polio in the area, say the psychiatrists, had made the hospital population fearful. After that, "anxiety must have been self-propagating and mass hysteria the major factor at work...
...diagnosis of hysteria in its epidemic form is not a slur on either the individuals or the institution involved," say McEvedy and Beard. "Whereas it is true that sporadic cases of hysterical disability often have disordered personalities, the hysterical reaction is part of everyone's potential and can be elicited in any individual by the right set of circumstances. A mass hysterical reaction shows not that the population is psychologically abnormal but merely that it is socially segregated and consists predominantly of young females...