ON THE MECHANISM OF PARANOIA
We have hitherto been dealing with the
father-complex, which was the dominant element in
Schreber’s case and with the wishful
phantasy round which the illness centred. But in all of this
there is nothing characteristic of the
form of disease known as paranoia, nothing that might not
be found (and that has not in fact been
found) in other kinds of neuroses. The distinctive
character of paranoia (or of dementia
paranoides) must be sought for elsewhere - namely, in the
particular form assumed by the symptoms;
and we shall expect to find that this is determined, not
by the nature of the complexes themselves,
but by the mechanism by which the symptoms are
formed or by which repression is brought
about. We should be inclined to say that what was
characteristically paranoic about the
illness was the fact that the patient, as a means of warding
off a homosexual wishful phantasy, reacted
precisely with delusions of persecution of this kind...
a number of cases of paranoid disorder
which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the
material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race,
occupation, and social
standing. Yet we were astonished to find
that in all of these cases defence against a
homosexual wish was clearly recognizable
at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the
disease and that it was in an attempt to
master an unconsciously reinforced current of
homosexuality that they had all of them
come to grief. This was certainly not what we had
expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder
in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far
from this, the strikingly prominent
features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males,
are social humiliations and slights. But
if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall
be able to see that the really operative
factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in
them by the homosexual components of
emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning
normally and it is consequently impossible
to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt
whether his emotional relations to his
neighbours in society have anything to do with sexuality,
either actually or in their genesis. But
delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace
back the social feelings to their roots in
a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy,
Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions
culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably
homosexual nature, had, by all accounts,
shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense
of the word.
I shall now endeavour (and I think the
attempt is neither unnecessary nor unjustifiable) to show
that the knowledge of psychological
processes, which, thanks to psycho-analysis, we now
possess, already enables us to understand
the part played by a homosexual wish in the
development of paranoia. Recent
investigations! have directed our attention to a stage in the
development of the libido which it passes
through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love."
This stage has been given the name of
narcissism. What happens is this. There comes a time in
the development of the individual at which
he unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto
been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in
order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by taking
himself, his own body, as his love-object,
and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice
of some person other than himself as his
object. This half-way phase between auto-erotism and
object-love may perhaps be indispensable
normally; but it appears that many people linger
unusually long in this condition, and that
many of its features are carried over by them into the
later stages of their development. What is
of chief importance in the subject’s self thus chosen as
a love object may already be the genitals.
The line of development then leads on to the choice of
an external object with similar genitals -
that is, to homosexual object-choice - and thence to
heterosexuality. People who are manifest
homosexuals in later life have, it may be presumed,
never emancipated themselves from the
binding condition that the object of their choice must
possess genitals like their own; and in
this connection the infantile sexual theories which attribute
the same kind of genitals to both sexes
exert much influence.
After the stage of heterosexual
object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are
not, as might be supposed, done away with
or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from
their sexual aim and applied to fresh
uses. They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts
and, as ‘attached’ components, help to
constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic
factor to friendship and comradeship, to
esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general.
How large a contribution is in fact
derived from erotic sources (with the sexual aim inhibited) could
scarcely be guessed from the normal social
relations of mankind. But it is not irrelevant to note
that it is precisely manifest homosexuals,
and among them again precisely those that set
themselves against an indulgence in
sensual acts, who are distinguished by taking a particularly
active share in the general interests of humanity
- interests which have themselves sprung from a
sublimation of erotic instincts.
In my Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality I have expressed the opinion that each stage in
the development of psychosexuality affords
a possibility of ‘fixation, and thus of a dispositional
point. People who have not freed
themselves completely from the stage of narcissism - who, that
is to say, have at that point a fixation
which may operate as a disposition to a later illness - are
exposed to the danger that some unusually
intense wave of libido, finding no other outlet, may
lead to a sexualization of their social
instincts and so undo the sublimations which they had
achieved in the course of their
development. This result may be produced by anything that
causes the libido to flow backwards (i.e.
that causes a ‘regression’): whether, on the one hand,
the libido becomes collaterally reinforced
owing to some disappointment over a woman, or is
directly dammed up owing to a mishap in
social relations with other men - both of these being
instances of ‘frustration’; or whether, on
the other hand, there is a general intensification of the
libido, so that it becomes too powerful to
find an outlet along the channels which are already
open to it, and consequently bursts
through its banks at the weakest spot. Since our analyses
show that paranoics endeavour to protect
themselves against any such sexualization of their
social instinctual cathexes, we are driven
to suppose that the weak spot in their development is
to be looked for somewhere between the
stages of auto-erotism, narcissism and homosexuality,
and that their disposition to illness
(which may perhaps be susceptible of more precise definition)
must be located in that region...
In taking the view, then, that what lies
at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among
males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of
loving a man, we shall certainly not forget that the
confirmation of such an important
hypothesis can only follow upon the investigation of a large
number of instances of every variety of
paranoic disorder. We must therefore be prepared, if
need be, to limit our assertion to a
single type of paranoia. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable fact
that the familiar principal forms of
paranoia can all be represented as contradictions of the single
proposition: ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’;
and indeed that they exhaust all the possible ways in
which such contradictions could be
formulated.
The proposition ‘I (a man) love him’ is
contradicted by: (a) Delusions of persecution; for they loudly assert:
‘I do not love him - I hate him.’ This
contradiction, which must have run thus in the unconscious, cannot, however,
become conscious to a paranoiac in this form. The mechanism of symptom-formation
in paranoia requires that internal perceptions - feelings - shall be replaced
by external perceptions. Consequently the
proposition ‘I hate him’ becomes
transformed by projection into another one: ‘He hates
(persecutes) me, which will justify me in
hating him.’ And thus the impelling unconscious feeling
makes its appearance as though it were the
consequence of an external perception:
‘I do not love him - I hate him, because
HE PERSECUTES ME.’
Observation leaves room for no doubt that
the persecutor is some one who was once loved. (b)
Another element is chosen for
contradiction in erotomania, which remains totally unintelligible on
any other view: ‘I do not love him - I
love her.’
And in obedience to the same need for
projection, the proposition is transformed into: ‘I observe
that she loves me.’
‘I do not love him - I love her, because
SHE LOVES ME.’ Many cases of erotomania might give an
impression that they could be
satisfactorily explained as being exaggerated or distorted heterosexual
fixations, if our attention were not attracted by the circumstance that these
infatuations invariably begin, not with any internal perception of loving, but
with an external perception of being loved. But in this form of paranoia the
intermediate proposition ‘I love her’ can also become conscious, because the
contradiction between it and the original proposition is not a diametrical one,
not so irreconcilable as that between love and hate: it is, after all, possible
to love her as well as him. It can thus come about that the proposition which
has been substituted by projection (‘she loves me’) may make way again for the
‘basic language’ proposition ‘I love her’.
‘It is not I who love the man - she loves
him’, and he suspects the woman in relation to all the
men whom he himself is tempted to love.
Distortion by means of projection is
necessarily absent in this instance, since, with the change of
the subject who loves, the whole process
is in any case thrown outside the self. The fact that the
woman loves the men is a matter of
external perception to him; whereas the facts that he himself
does not love but hates, or that he
himself loves not this but that person, are matters of internal
perception.
‘It is not I who love the women - he loves
them.’ The jealous woman suspects her husband in
relation to all the women by whom she is
herself attracted owing to her homosexuality and the
dispositional effect of her excessive
narcissism. The influence of the time of life at which her
fixation occurred is clearly shown by the
selection of the love-objects which she imputes to her
husband; they are often old and quite
inappropriate for a real love relation - revivals of the nurses
and servants and girls who were her
friends in childhood, or sisters who were her actual rivals.
Now it might be supposed that a
proposition consisting of three terms, such as ‘I love him’,
could only be contradicted in three
different ways. Delusions of jealousy contradict the subject,
delusions of persecution contradict the
verb, and erotomania contradicts the object. But in fact a
fourth kind of contradiction is possible -
namely, one which rejects the proposition as a whole:
‘I do not love at all - I do not love any
one.’ And since, after all, one’s libido must go somewhere,
this proposition seems to be the
psychological equivalent of the proposition: ‘I love only myself.’
So that this kind of contradiction would
give us megalomania, which we may regard as a sexual
overvaluation of the ego and may thus set
beside the overvaluation of the love-object with which
we are already familiar.
The most striking characteristic of
symptom-formation in paranoia is the process which deserves
the name of projection. An internal
perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after
undergoing a certain kind of distortion,
enters consciousness in the form of an external
perception. In delusions of persecution
the distortion consists in a transformation of affect; what
should have been felt internally as love
is perceived externally as hate...
fixation... is the precursor and necessary
condition of every ‘repression’. Fixation can be described in this way. One
instinct or instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the
anticipated normal path of development, and, in
consequence of this inhibition in its
development, it is left behind at a more infantile stage. The libidinal current
in question then behaves in relation to later psychological structures like one
belonging to the system of the unconscious, like one that is repressed....
Since I neither fear the criticism of
others nor shrink from criticizing myself, I have no motive for
avoiding the mention of a similarity which
may possibly damage our libido theory in the estimation
of many of my readers. Schreber’s ‘rays of
God’, which are made up of a condensation of the
sun’s rays, of nerve fibres, and of
spermatozoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete
representation and projection outwards of
libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a
striking conformity with our theory. His
belief that the world must come to an end because his ego
was attracting all the rays to itself, his
anxious concern at a later period, during the process of
reconstruction, lest God should sever His
ray-connection with him, - these and many other details
of Schreber’s delusional structure sound
almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes
whose existence I have assumed in these
page as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I
can nevertheless call a friend and
fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of
paranoia before I became acquainted with
the contents of Schreber’s book. It remains for the
future to decide whether there is more
delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or
whether there is more truth in Schreber’s
delusion than other people are as yet prepared to
believe.
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