Hysteria

Hysteria (from the Greek hystera ("uterus") for centuries referred to a wide range of women's medical or psychiatric symptoms, but is currently used (pejoratively) for any exaggerated emotional display.

..."hysteria," it appears, is .. an epithet with which men have stigmatized women across the ages. ~ Edward Shorter

Quotes

• ... "hysteria," it appears, is .. an epithet with which men have stigmatized women across the ages.
  • Edward Shorter, Hysteria Beyond Freud 1993 University of California Press p 11

• ... the word itself has become so generically linked with the feminine in popular understanding that we need to specify male hysteria the way we specify women writers, whereas to say female hysteria sounds redundant.
  • Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud 1993 University of California Press p 290

• ... throughout the centuries doctors have sought to find other names for hysteria in men. As [French psychiatrist Lucien] Israel explains, "The hysteria diagnosis became for a man . . . the real injury, a sign of weakness, a castration in a word. To say to a man 'you are hysterical' became under these conditions a form of saying to him 'You are not a man.'"
  • Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud 1993 University of California Press p 290

• ... hysteria has been constructed as a perjorative term for femininity in a duality that relegated the more honorable masculine form to another category.
  • Elaine Showalter in Hysteria Beyond Freud p 292

• Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination... Alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.
  • Harry S. Truman, Address at the National Archives dedicating a shrine for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (15 December 1952)

• This moment in time... anywhere you turn people are talking about how bad things are, how terrible it is...everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria... and it’s getting worse... We’re not supposed to match it or even get locked into resisting or pushing against it. We’re supposed to see this moment in time for what it is. We’re supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria.
  • Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey's Empowering 2018 USC Commencement Speech, Entrepreneur, (14 May 2018)