Thereafter, the entire conflict became internalized as the collective anxiety hysteria which we know today as totemic religion.

The same anxiety, Freud proposed, is seen in infants who are fearful of strangers and anything new, and in adults as "anxiety hysteria," a neurosis that might now be called an "anxiety disorder."

In 1987 Otto Fenichel agreed when he proposed, "Many anxiety hysterias develop out of such an experience, a fear of anxiety, and simultaneously a readiness to become frightened very easily, which may create a vicious cycle."

While his definition is sometimes adhered to, others such as Ali-Gombe et al. of the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria contest Wesseley's definition and describe outbreaks with qualities of both mass motor and anxiety hysteria.

In the individual it is the culmination of childhood psychosexual development and produces - or should produce - the resolution of the Oedipus complex and provides the totemic parallel of childhood, the animal phobia, and the equivalent in adult psychopathology, the anxiety hysteria.

Written by Dr Richard Mackarness, a psychiatrist at Basingstoke District Hospital, it described the good results of dietary change on a patient called 'Joanna' whose severe mental disturbance had been variously diagnosed as 'schizophrenia, schizo-affective psychosis, presenile dementia, temporal lobe epilepsy, neurotic depression and anxiety hysteria.'