unnerve

unnerve, enervate, unman, emasculate can all mean to deprive of strength or vigor and of the capacity for endurance, overcoming difficulties, or making progress.

Unnerve implies marked loss of courage, steadiness, and self-control or of power to act or fight usually as a result of some calamity or sudden shock

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government was unnerved, confounded, and in a manner suspended— Burke

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that beloved name unnerved my arm— Arnold

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entered . . . hesitantly, unnerved and bewildered— Styron

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the narcotic and unnerving property of these stimulants has been thoroughly established— Day Lewis

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Enervate implies a more gradual physical or moral weakening or dissipation of one's strength until one is too feeble to make effort; usually the term implies a weakening of moral fiber under the influence of such debilitating factors as luxury, indolence, or effeminacy

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those unhappy, people whose tender minds a long course of felicity has enervated— Bolingbroke

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Plato asserts that a life of drudgery disfigures the body and . . . enervates the soul— Dickinson

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Unman implies loss of manly fortitude or spirit; it often suggests a shameful reduction to tears, tremors, extreme timidity, or other state regarded as womanish

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what, quite unmanned in folly? .... Fie, for shame!— Shak.

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the strangeness of the night... the dead man they had left in the field had unsettled them all and had unmanned at least one of them— Cheever

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Emasculate (see also STERILIZE 1) implies a loss of essential or effective power especially by the removal of something (as a factor or a condition) which has made for strength (as of a person, a group, or a law)

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Hellenism . . . was not destroyed, though it was emasculated, by the loss of politi-cal freedom— Inge

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many states emasculate such civil rights statutes as exist— Swindler

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Analogous words: upset, agitate, perturb (see DISCOMPOSE): bewilder, distract, confound (see PUZZLE vb): *weaken, enfeeble, sap, undermine