What Is Paranoia And Why Is It Harmful?

What exactly is paranoia? Before we answer that, it is worth mentioning that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists have slightly different answers. The concept first began in psychiatry, and people initially thought it was just some kind of insanity.

As time went on, the psychiatric field just considered it another diagnosis. This was partly because experts began to see it as just being a part of other mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. Thus, it was no longer a separate condition and became more a symptom of others. According to the DSM , the condition that most closely resembles is delusions.

It’s a completely different story with psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud considered it a form of neurosis that came from obsession. Later, especially thanks to the Schreber case, he began to regard it as a form of psychosis. Then there was Lacan, who actually wrote his doctoral dissertation based on the Aimée case: Cured paranoia.

A little history

For a long time, people used the word paranoia as a synonym for insanity. The German Kahlbaum was the first person to refer to it in 1863 as a separate condition. Kraft-Ebing took this concept a little further in 1879. He defined it as “mental alienation that primarily affects judgment and reasoning” .

Although there were other attempts to describe this mental problem, Kraepelin’s theory from 1889 stood out. From that moment on, people understood paranoia as a kind of disorder where you have misguided ideas with no other meaningful symptoms.

It stood in the DSM until 1987, when it was replaced by syndromes such as “delusion” and “paranoid personality disorder”.

Paranoia and psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud began talking about paranoia without fully conceptualizing it in his book The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense (1894). Freudian psychoanalysis focused mainly on neurosis. To begin with, Freud associated paranoia with projection, but he ended up not concluding further.

Neisser came to shape the basic way in which psychoanalysis views paranoia as a mental state. He said it was essentially “a unique way of interpreting” . A paranoid person feels that everything they see and hear is somehow about them.

Jacques Lacan took this concept much further. In a text from 1958, in which he talks about Freud’s Schreber case, he defines paranoia as “identification of pleasure in another person’s place” .

Lacan was a cryptic writer and is not easy to understand. In simple terms, his statement is like the motto of paranoia: “The other enjoys me” .

Clarification of the concept of paranoia

In psychoanalysis, a paranoid is not just a mistrustful person that we tend to think. A person with this condition works from two assumptions. The first is that some kind of “evil” or “bad” thing has been unleashed and that they will become its victim. The second is that what is going on in the world is related to them.

The paranoid person interprets the world through these two lenses, based on their delusion. A delusion is basically a nonsensical story. When it comes to paranoia, that story is about some kind of evil that sees the person as prey. “Evil spirits take over my mind,” for example.

In this state, they interpret all the things they see through the lens of history that their minds have brought to life. Thus, something as simple as losing a property could be proof that these spirits, aliens, demons, or whatever they are, are playing with and tormenting them.

That’s the motto Lacan pointed out: “The other one enjoys me.” In light of this, they feel “passivated”. They move everything that happens to them to the other: “It was not me, it was them” . This belief and that delusion can lead to simple things, such as jealousy, or to more serious issues, such as the Aimée case.