A beautiful girl is dragged by the nurses into a tub of ice-cold water, thrashing about and screaming at the top of her voice. This is a description of a scene from the recent acclaimed film 'A Dangerous Method'. The heroine suffers from hysteria, a disorder that was at the time studied by Dr Gustav Jung. Today, we are able to say much more about hysteria. Hysterical neurosis, popular hysteria, is considered by many not so much as a disease syndrome, but as a personality trait that can temporarily exacerbate into a disorder requiring medical intervention.

Many people with hysterical disorders are simply highly egocentric personalities, wanting to focus all the attention of those around them on themselves. In exceptional cases, hysterical symptoms can escalate to a psychotic syndrome. Hysteria can also occur in large groups of people - prisons, the military. In colloquial language, the word 'hysteria' has a very pejorative overtone, functioning as an insult, a contemptuous epithet. From a medical point of view, hysteria is a neurosis. Today, in psychology, one can speak of a hysterical personality. Its predominant characteristics are emotional immaturity, volatility of moods, dependence on the views of others.

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Hysteria is a nervous imbalance caused by psychological trauma or overload of the nervous system. The absence of psychotic symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations is characteristic of hysteria. The neurotic symptoms here are due to the intrinsic qualities of the person that make him or her react in a way that is different from what is generally accepted. What others take calmly the hysteric experiences very strongly.