ABSTRACT
Paranoid anxiety, like the poor, is always with us. Indeed it is difficult to find a patient who would not to some degree have paranoid anxieties. We are all apt to defend against guilt, loss or even uncertainty, by looking for somebody to blame. Some potential for paranoia is also necessary as a basis for discrimination. Like Freud’s statement about the infant’s original relation to objects, ‘This I shall take in; this I shall spit out’, we must ‘taste’ experience, keeping in mind the potential that it might be bad as well as the potential that it might be good (Freud, 1911a). And underlying the ‘potential for bad’ are not only our past reality experiences but also our repressed paranoid phantasies, which have to be tested by experience. Indeed, if we meet someone apparently free of paranoid anxieties or suspicions we suspect that he suffers from ‘anti-paranoia’ and is using idealization and denial to keep his mind free, possibly from paranoid anxieties too real and frightening to bear. Of course some individuals are more prone to paranoid suspicions or anxieties than others, and it may be built into the character, and some degree of paranoid distortion invariably accompanies neurotic conditions, without amounting to what we clinically call ‘a paranoia’.
