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Melancholia vs Hysteria - What's the difference?

melancholia | hysteria |

As nouns the difference between melancholia and hysteria

is that melancholia is deep sadness or gloom; melancholy while hysteria is hysteria.

melancholia

English

Noun

  • Deep sadness or gloom; melancholy
  • Clinical depression, characterised by irrational fears, guilt and apathy
  • Derived terms

    * melancholiac

    hysteria

    Noun

  • Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic.
  • (medicine) A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.
  • * '>citation
  • The typical cases of hysteria cited by Freud thus involved a
    moral conflict—a conflict about what the young women in
    question wanted to do with themselves. Did they want to
    prove that they were good daughters by taking care of their
    sick fathers? Or did they want to become independent of their
    parents, by having a family of their own, or in some other
    way? I believe it was the tension between these conflicting
    aspirations that was the crucial issue in these cases. The sexual
    problem—say, of the daughter's incestuous cravings for her
    father—was secondary (if that important); it was stimulated,
    perhaps, by the interpersonal situation in which the one had to
    attend to the other's body. Moreover, it was probably easier to
    admit the sexual problem to consciousness and to worry about
    it than to raise the ethical problem indicated.3 In the final
    analysis, the latter is a vastly difficult problem in living. It
    cannot be "solved" by any particular maneuver but requires
    rather decision making about basic goals, and, having made
    the decisions, dedicated efforts to attain them.

    Synonyms

    * (mental disorder) female hysteria

    Derived terms

    * anxiety hysteria * conversion hysteria * ecohysteria * female hysteria * mass hysteria