All psychiatric disorders hysteria has the longest
and most checkered history. Deriving originally from the ancient Greeks it was,
until relatively recently, assumed to be solely a dysfunction of women and
caused by a "wandering" uterus (hysteron = uterus). Psychoanalytic theory helped
in providing a more reasonable etiology, but the link between gender and the
disorder was not completely severed, males were rarely so diagnosed. The
symptoms that have been cited most often are hallucinations, somnambulism,
paralysis, and dissociation. This has become relatively rare in industrialized
societies.