Suspicion. Paranoids are universally suspicious and wary. Since nothing good is ever expected, nothing new can be anticipated with joy or hope. Every unopened door leads to danger or disaster; every messenger comes bearing bad news; every stranger is a potential harm doer. The unknown is always a harbinger for, and an extension of, the paranoid’s familiar and expected feelings of deprivation. Hopelessness, being trapped in an unrewarding environment, facilitates acts of desperation. The abandonment of a life of frustration and humiliation is by definition less irrational than leaving one of hope and opportunity. If, in addition, there is a certitude—an assurance by those who know—that death is not a terminus, void, or end, but a portal to a new and better life, even a reasonably rational person may elect to become a suicide bomber.
Chronic Anger. Chronic anger becomes a way of life with paranoids. The anger is not always expressed but can remain dormant, awaiting an opportunity for excessive and often explosive expression. Rage, even misguided rage, is an empowering emotion, particularly when it is used as a substitute for fear, guilt, or shame. When rage is sustained over time, and when it is attached to an enemy who has been designated as the cause of their misery, paranoids enter the realm of hatred.
Self-Referentiality. All paranoid personalities are extraordinarily self-referential, like their more seriously damaged counterparts, true paranoiacs. Group inconveniences or misfortunes are always dismissed. Paranoiacs insistently focus their attention on their own misfortune. Beyond seeing unfortunate events as happening only to them, they see those events as happening because of them. A paranoid is enraged that his plane is always late, never mind that everyone’s plane is always late. The storms that disrupt his travel plans are designed to deprive him. Even when there is no tangible person to blame, simply the winds and the rain, a metaphoric unnamed agent will be inferred.
Narcissism. A paranoid is the quintessential narcissist. It isn’t that it always rains on his parade—an indication of his bad luck. Rather, it is that it rains because of his parade. This suggests that he feels—even without the formulation of a delusion—that he has been selected for misery by some unnamed and invisible forces.
At its extreme, these perceptions are referred to in psychiatry as “ideas of reference.” The term is used in relation to a set of symptoms that are halfway to delusions. While not yet hearing voices, the paranoid with ideas of reference has the uncomfortable sense that people are looking at him, noticing him, or even closer to delusion, whispering about him. This explains the care with which New Yorkers avoid eye contact in close public spaces such as subways. “Whad’ya looking at?” from a paranoid stranger can be a prelude to an assault. In this context, looking is never interpreted as a glance of admiration, since the paranoid sees nothing in himself that others would admire. The paranoid personality’s perspective always subsumes there is purpose and intent in all events, large or small, and the plan is always designed to deprive him, not just of goods, but of respect and love.
Paranoid Shift or “Projection.” Finally—and most crucial—a paranoid shift always occurs in paranoid thinking. I use this term as an alternative to the more ambiguous word “projection,” which is the hallmark of paranoia. Projection is the process of attributing one’s own impulses, feelings, or desires to others. The classic example is in Freud’s attributing sexual jealousy to a projection of the jealous person’s own desire to philander. Modern abnormal psychology places greater emphasis on the self, interpersonal relations, and adaptation than on instinct and impulse. In this frame of reference, it is more useful to see the paranoid mechanism in broader terms. It is not just our unconscious desire that we shift or project. It is the total responsibility for our failed existence that is transferred. In the process, rage supplants guilt.
The result of a paranoid shift is almost inevitably a conspiratorial view of life. “It”—whatever disaster or disgrace that stands for—didn’t just happen, it was done to him. The paranoid always feels he is the victim of someone’s machinations. He is denied promotion because he is old, obese, black, a Jew, not because he is less competent. The readiness to accept conspiracy theories in the modern American culture is a testament to the rising insecurity in our society.
Conjuring up a conspiracy is an alternative to being forced to accept the fragility of existence. It can extend, beyond paranoia, to relatively normal segments of the population. It relieves them of facing the randomness and chanciness of their own existence. It is too much to accept that something as precious as life can hang by a thread in the hands of a disinterested fate. Someone must be to blame for the tragedies that fill the evening newscasts. Accidental tragic events that arbitrarily choose one and spare another must be a product of some design or purpose. The randomness of life is a burden too great for many to endure.
Conspiracy theory demands enemies, thus completing the worldview of the paranoid. A tragedy does not just happen; someone makes it happen. And if they make it happen to us, they are by definition our enemies. All that remains is to locate the enemies and deal with them.
Grievance Collectors
The paranoid personality is sentenced by his own psychology to go through life with a constant sense of deprivation. Something to which he is entitled has been taken away from him. An actual state of material deprivation is not a necessary condition for paranoia or hatred. Since a feeling of deprivation goes well beyond material things, it will always at heart be seen as love and respect that has been denied.
Grievance collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. They are often right. There is something about the defensiveness of the paranoid personality that invites just such behavior. People are more likely to treat them ungenerously and even unfairly in response to their churlish hostility. But even if they are not given less, they will perceive that which they have been given to be less. And they, like the rest of us, accept their perceptions as reality.
After a while they begin to seek out their own injustices. They are unhappy with success. Actual deprivation is preferred. It confirms their most profound and paranoid suspicions, thus confounding their critics. They have been accused of being paranoid—overly suspicious, cynical, and mistrusting; so be it. They will embrace this position. Each event in which they have been taken advantage of becomes a triumph for their bias. They are truly grievance collectors.
Underlying this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life. Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another person’s abundance of good fortune. It is essential for the maintenance of the grievance collector’s view of life not only to feel deprived but also to see evidence of his own deprivation in other people’s good fortune. Envy is the accompaniment of his chronic state of anger. It supports and encourages it. All the evidence he so diligently collects only confirms that he is unfairly and inequitably served at every turn. Grievance collectors have constructed a world in which they choose to live where there are always winners and losers and they are always one of the losers. So, all winning diminishes them, and the only source of joy is schadenfreude.
It is my contention that it is never exclusively the deprivation of material goods to which grievance collectors are sensitive. The generosity of spirit and amiability that can be found in some of the poorest of cultures is tribute to the human spirit. Paranoids are sensitive to lack of respect, not lack of things. They are particularly sensitive to slights and abuses, which they see everywhere. They are constantly being diminished, or in modern terms, “disrespected.”
Grievance collectors are the children of emot
ional poverty. So bruised and damaged is their self-esteem that they no longer hope for love, luck, or privilege. To hope for the good is to court disappointment and thereby compound their pain. To protect themselves from further disappointment, they anticipate the negative event. Traditionally, psychoanalysts have rooted such feelings of deprivation in a feeling of unlovability, a diminished sense of self-worth, fostered in early childhood. Many paranoids were indeed less-favored children. Family dynamics are complex. Some children are preferred to others for reasons that are not always apparent to outsiders. Compounding this felt injustice is the fact that all children raised with paranoid parents are likely to have paranoid tendencies. Children are more than ready to accept their parents’ views of the world. A paranoid parental atmosphere, like an anxious one, is highly contagious.
This paranoid tendency can extend outward from the family and become the nucleus for a paranoid community. The paranoid community will then assure that the families within it have a culturally determined heavy dose of paranoia. Each enlargement from individual to family to community serves to lend greater and greater credibility to the paranoid ideation. Those who share the paranoid’s environment now confirm the world as the hostile place that he perceives it to be. The Palestinian refugee camps are ideal environments for nurturing a paranoid view of life and a culture of hatred. Deprived of what they perceive as their proper homes by their enemies, the Jews, and unwelcome in the general populations of their “friends” in the Arab communities, the refugees are ripe for manipulation and exploitation.
For the most part, typical paranoids will not go through life in a constant state of overt rage. They will nurse their anger. They may even embrace it, living out their lives in a steady state of sullenness and anger with those others who may not yet be identified, but who have, by the paranoids’ lights, deprived them of that which is rightfully theirs. They are like coiled springs waiting for opportunities to release the latent powers of their tension.
Paranoid ideation can thus be seen as being present in a spectrum from modest to severe, in this way no different from such character traits as generosity, affection, or narcissism. The final stage—the ultimate and most extreme expression of paranoid thinking—occurs in the fortunately rare form of a paranoid psychosis. The true paranoiac is the prototypic “lunatic,” as expressed in popular literature and as perceived in the popular imagination. The condition is part of the recorded annals of almost all civilizations and is recognized in almost every culture as aberrant. The psychotic is a key player in the world of terror. And he must be distinguished from that antisocial menace, the psychopath.
9
THE PSYCHOTIC AND THE PSYCHOPATH
Human beings are unlikely to develop into either villains or heroes. Nor are we for the most part psychotic or psychopathic. Most of us spend our lives living and acting in that generously broad environment called normal. When confronted with the rare extremes of human perversity, we are forced to re-examine our attitudes about ourselves and our species. When we are exposed to true evil, our first tendency is to turn away or explain away—to deny or rationalize. But true evil must be faced. We must examine the acts of terrorism and try to understand the kind of people who are prepared to commit them.
In this chapter I describe two sets of behavior that are beyond the borders of normalcy, psychosis and psychopathic behavior. Both are involved with hatred. These two behaviors are often conflated because of the confusing terminology. They must be differentiated. They represent entirely different conditions that have different degrees of culpability and demand different forms of action.
I will not attempt to offer a definitive discussion of a paranoid psychosis here.38 The appalling examples of hatred and human massacres witnessed in the past century and discussed in this book are not functions of rampaging madmen. Madness does not ordinarily lend itself to such organized behavior. It is the nature of the paranoid schizophrenic to avoid groups—not organize them. The purpose of discussing the paranoiac is that, as is often the case, it is easier to grasp the fundamentals of a condition at its extreme. The terrorists of Al Qaeda have been indoctrinated with paranoid ideas, but they are for the most part not psychotic. The individual, “self-employed” terrorist is usually a paranoid schizophrenic.
The Psychotic
Paranoia is the psychosis that is involved with acts of hatred. It is characterized by the formation of delusions and, in rare cases, hallucinations. The delusions fall into two seemingly contradictory categories: delusions of persecution and delusions of grandeur. A delusion is a false belief that entails an abandonment of all reality testing. A hallucination is a false perception often auditory—voices or radio messages from another planet—or visual and tactile hallucination, as with the creeping insects that plague an alcoholic in delirium tremens.
While many hallucinations are chemically triggered, a delusion can still be understood in the same model used for lesser symptoms—as a coping mechanism, a misguided repair. A genetic predisposition, a chemical imbalance, and a dynamic explanation are not mutually exclusive mechanisms. As described previously in my analogy with music (see chapter 3), they must be viewed as different frames of references, different languages, brought to bear in an attempt to shed light and bring understanding to a complex human experience.
A psychotic delusion is one of the most bewildering and intriguing of symptoms. Grotesque as it may seem, it still subscribes to the general rule of a symptom as an attempt to control overwhelming anxiety. The repair is a costly one; delusions are the most destructive of symptoms, since they demand a true suspension of reality testing. To be certain that God is directing you to a specific mission of destroying known agents of the devil—or to actually believe that you are God—is to suspend belief in the real world beyond what normal self-deceptions require. Because this distortion in thinking is central to the various forms of schizophrenia, they have been referred to as thought (or thinking) disorders. Schizophrenia is one major subdivision of psychotic behavior. Affective (emotional) disorders, like depression, constitute the other category.
How could such bizarre ideation serve the purposes of daily life? It does so in the same way that avoidance serves the phobic. It offers a method of controlling, limiting, and rationalizing a free-floating and all-pervasive anxiety. Anxiety is the price we pay for the human capacity to anticipate the unknown future.
We tend to use words in everyday speech differently from the way psychiatrists use them. We say we feel anxious about an oral examination, job interview, or performance that is about to take place. Psychiatry would consider that worry. Psychiatrists distinguish anxiety from worry, reserving the latter for the emotion consequent to some impending and potentially dangerous event—a job interview, the need to enter a dark, enclosed space. Anxiety is reserved for a form of dread that has no immediately apparent stimulus. Since it exists without awareness of any threatening source or justification, it is labeled “free-floating anxiety.” At one time or another most of us have experienced free-floating anxiety, an unknown dread that produces an edginess or even agitation.
Imagine a person, however, whose life is suffused with an overwhelming, constant, and pervasive free-floating anxiety. His life will be almost unmanageable. Here is where psychotic delusion formation may offer relief. If the psychotic makes the break from reality, he may delusionally decide, for example, that the person he most trusts, his mother, is not the person he thought she was, but an agent of his enemies. She is trying to poison him. This delusion rationalizes his anxiety. He is not crazy. It is logical and natural to feel frightened in the face of direct attempts on one’s life.
In addition, the delusion universalizes his experience, thereby relieving his feelings of being strange or different; any rational person would feel anxious in these circumstances. Finally the symptom controls the anxiety by limiting its locus and focus. He need not feel anxious except when he is home and even then only when he is eating. He can control the anxiety by not eating the fo
od prepared, or by taking precautions to make sure that his portions were not tampered with. This salvages time and energy to pursue his other normal activities. He controls the formerly all-pervasive anxiety by focusing it into one area of life rather than allowing it to spill over and contaminate all areas.
A delusion need not be simply the product of anxiety. It may be triggered by an immense rage, an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt, and what is most likely, an amalgam of all these emotions that leave the subject feeling impotent, helpless, and hopeless. This can produce the nightmare known as clinical depression, but in a person with a paranoid personality or a schizophrenic capacity to suspend reality, a delusional alternative is available.
The paranoid shift starts as a means of salvaging some self-respect out of humiliating circumstances. This shift allows the paranoid to view his misery as a product of the willful acts of some alien others. This shift allows the individual to view himself as a victim rather than a failure; guilt and fear are converted into rage, and shame is transformed into indignation. In the process, the individual is often transformed into a noble martyr chosen by God or some other higher source. It is this that links the delusions of persecution to the delusions of grandeur.
Sylvia Nasar in her biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a Nobel Prize winner in economics, presented an intriguing modern view of a paranoid schizophrenic.39 The successful movie adapted from the remarkable book made the workings of the paranoid mind—and the ways in which they are first incorporated into and eventually become destructive of the person’s life—understandable to a vast audience. Nash, a brilliant mathematician teaching at Princeton, was plagued with persecutory delusions, which led him to construct a complex view that placed him in a heroic struggle against evil, in which he was the secret agent of the CIA.
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