Masterson,

She got back to me with a few words of the subject, I'll paste them here: "hysteria comes from the greek meaning 'womb' so yes it has a female etymology. there was a belief in ancient times that the womb did not stay fixed but roamed around in women's bodies and caused them all sorts of trouble. threads of this opinion still surface today. and there certainly was a kind of rampant (some would say hysterical) kind of mythology about the link between the womb and its removal being the equivalent of women's madness and their sanity.
However, many would argue that men can be hysterical, or suffer from hysteria. There are various old case studies of men developing such things as 'hysterical pregnancies' or phantom limbs, etc. in their distress. This is particularly so if you view hysteria as not naturally tied to sex but a by-product of gender conditioning and a sense of powerlessness. From what I recall Freud did see hysteria as the female neurosis par excellence and obsession as its masculine equivalent. It is also interesting to note that a Lacanian Jacques Alain-Miller suggests that the there is a hysterical moment in the cure of obsessive behaviours so that the two are not entirely separable

Freud did not really discover hysteria (it has its origins on Egyptian papyri!) but he did give it credibility (and a pathology), as it formed the cornerstone of his 'new science' psychoanalysis. His patient, Ida Bauer, he called "Dora" (a name which he gave to her, and was the name of his sister's maid) in his case study called "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)"."

I realise this didn't actually help you to find a new word. I found looking up "hysteria" rather interesting, as it seemed to excavatea couple of thousand years of attitudes towards 1)gender, 2)madness and 3)the "discovery/invention" of the unconscious mind, which has so influenced contemporary thinking/assumptions about the mind (which strikes me as playing a role which used to be occupied by the concept of "satanic infestation" in Western cultures.)

Thank you for your post, as I enjoyed what it unearthed.