ABSTRACT
Psychologically the essence of the situation is unalterability in one’s thoughts, immunity from all the impingements of the environment, and, in consequence, being oneself unalterable, a necessity to alter the environment to fit one’s own psychology, with an insistence which suggests that the operation is essential for the maintenance of one’s own health or one’s own life itself. So much for the main outline of the psychopathology of paranoia is in general. The particular form which the system of delusions takes in specific cases is determined by a number of less fundamental causes and mechanisms. In other words, the difference between a neurosis and a psychosis is that in the former, with reference to some particular matter a part but not the whole of the mind is “mad” and that neuroses are partial or incomplete psychoses.
