anxiety hysteria

noun

Medical Definition of anxiety hysteria

: an anxiety disorder and especially a phobia when the mental aspects of anxiety are emphasized over any accompanying physical symptoms (as heart palpitations and breathlessness) —used especially in Freudian psychoanalytic theory In conversion hysteria the affect of the repressed complexes is drafted into bodily innervation and produces the physical symptoms of the disease. In anxiety hysteria the affect remains in the mental sphere, producing there various phobias.— Smith Ely Jelliffe and William Alanson White, Disease of the Nervous System, 1915