Paranoid
| The paranoid
individual takes a step beyond the schizophrenic individual. He does not
completely devalue and retreat from external reality, rather he attaches
negative value to much of the surrounding world and braces himself
tensely to avoid its feel-bad aspects. Like the schizophrenic, however,
he too is much more invested in himself and his inner processes than in
external reality and tends to confuse his own imaginings with real world
events. He does not usually do this at a level of perceptual distortion,
but more at a level of cognitive distortion. He is much more likely to
develop delusions about what is taking place around him than he is to
hear and see things that are not there.
Where the schizophrenic turns his attention away from the world, the paranoid does just the opposite. He is super-attentive to what is going on around him, but in an overly narrow way. He has his eyes and ears wide open trying to detect every little sign of potential threat or danger. He scours his environment, looking for the clues of inimical activity which he knows he will find. He operates much like a spy dropped behind enemy lines during wartime. He tries to stay out of sight as much as possible, to keep his back to the wall, and to keep all of his senses sharply attuned to even the slightest sign that the enemy is on to him. He tends to interpret even the most innocent of events as having threatening significance. Most of the anger and hostility that he sees being directed at him by others, is actually his own, even though he does not recognize it as belonging to him. He is said to project his own negative thoughts and feelings onto his social (and sometimes physical) environment. so that it seems to him that the world is a very angry, potentially punitive place against which he has to defend himself. Often the paranoid individual sees himself as on the side of all that is good and true and the target of persecution by agents of evil and falsehood. When his sense of persecution builds (usually in proportion to his own frustrated anger), he often justifies his very angry, hostile, sometimes violent reactions, on the grounds that he was pushed into them by the hostility and aggression of his persecutors. He almost always believes that he was acting righteously in his own defense. In more extreme instances, the basic disconnection from external reality becomes apparent in the bizarre delusional beliefs of the paranoid individual, in which he may see himself as having been singled out for persecution by all-powerful beings, organizations, governments, or even extraterrestrial lifeforms. Although this person may be highly intelligent in other areas of his life, he can be totally irrational and closed to logical argument in the area of his delusional beliefs. This image attempts to depict the paranoid's posture in life. He sees signs of danger all around him, and in overly self-invested, self-important fashion has the sense that everyone is looking at him, talking about him, or directing noxious influences his way. If enemies are not shooting electronic beams into his head, they are discharging poisons into the air he breathes. He may be convinced that he is being watched and influenced by aliens circling the planet in UFOs, or that the FBI and the CIA are aligned against him and spying on him, or that he has been made the object of a Mafia hit and is being followed wherever he goes. Although it is he who has his eyes warily open and is watching everyone and everything with microscopic intensity, he projects this motive onto his surroundings so that it seems that someone or something is always watching his every movement. |
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