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Homosexuality and Paranoia PDF
Homosexuality and Paranoia PDF
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Homosexuality and
Paranoia
a
Lis Lind M.D.
a
Smedjevgen 12, S-131 33, Nacka, Sweden
Version of record first published: 21 Jan
2013.
To cite this article: Lis Lind M.D. (1982): Homosexuality and Paranoia, The
Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 5:1, 5-30
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Scand. Psychoanal. Rev. (1982) 5, 5-30
Lis Lind
5
more lasting relationships, mostly with men somewhat older
than himself. He has no formal education and has maintained
himself by varying unqualified employments, but aesthetic and
creative work is what he is really interested in.
P, as I will call the paranoid analysand, is 36 years old and lives
together with two daughters who are in their teens. He has an
academic degree and holds a relatively high appointment in a
Government office. He married at an early age. After having
divorced his wife some years ago, he developed a severe perse-
cution mania. The paranoid ideas soon toned down, but they
have reappeared periodically and are still latent.
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Ever since Freud (1911) wrote his paper on president Schreber, unmask-
ing the homosexual wishful fantasy inherent in paranoid ideas, it has
been well-known, at least to psychoanalysts, that the paranoiac directs
his libido first and foremost towards homosexual objects. Evidently, the
paranoiac shares this peculiarity with the manifestly homosexual person.
In the case of H it was an unmistakable fact, whereas P was totally
unaware of any homosexual impulses until he started his psychoanalysis.
However, during the first weeks of his analysis they appeared abundantly
and, for a time, wholly dominated material. It was soon possible to grasp
Paper read to the Swedish Psycho-Analytical Society, November 30, 1981.
the events that had led to his first psychotic breakdown 3 or 4 years
before.
6
The main question which I have been asking myself and which I am
going to discuss, is why H and P keat their homosexual impulses so
differently. How is it possible for one of them to accept his homosexuality
and to act it out, apparently without experiencing serious conflicts, while
the other seems compelled to avoid becoming conscious of it at any price,
even at the price of a manifest psychosis. Which differences in their
representational worlds are reflected in such different solutions?
The first answer to the question, and the most superficial one, is of
course that H and P must have different fantasies about the consequences
of a man having sexual intercourse with another man.
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7
two parts: a lower God Ahriman and an upper God Ormuzd. Freud
(1911, p. 53) supposes that his cleaving of God in two, reflects the fact
that Schreber's father imago included the imago of his elder brother as a
'lower God'. This may be true, but in my view a wider understanding of
the text is attained by interpreting the two Gods as a reflection of the
inherent doubleness of a phallic father imago. In Schreber's (1903, p. 74)
words: "The rays of the lower God (Ahriman) have the power of produc-
ing the miracle of unmanning; the ravs of the upper God (Ormuzd) have
the power of restoring manliness when necessary". In Schreber's
psychosis Ahriman comes off victorious. The 'male protest' gives way to
the feminine wishful fantasy at the same time as Schreber notes that the
function of Ormuzd has dissolved in that of Ahriman. Schreber solves his
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8
ence of the 'object-homoerotic', e.g. Freeman (1955). If we turn to an
extra-psychoanalytic expert in the vicissitudes of homosexual drives,
Marcel Proust, who wrote his main work at about the same time as
Ferenczi conceived the theory just mentioned, we are unambiguously
informed that there is only one genuine male homosexual wish, i.e. the
feminine one. A homosexual man, Proust (1921) states, is a woman in the
disguise of a man. He belongs to "a race ... whose ideal is masculine, just
because its character is feminine". Baron de Charlus, who is from the
beginning depicted as a caricature of a masculine man, is impiteously
unmasked in the process of the novel- and of life - and ends up by taking
that shape of a lovable elderly lady which expresses his deeper nature.
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Many overt homosexuals are, like Proust's baron, able to alternate bet-
ween passive and active behavior in their sexual relationships. This, how-
ever, does not necessarily imply a change in the underlying fantasy.
9
H declares that he is always longing for a state of passiveness.
He spends a good deal of his spare time lying alone at home in
his bed. He has made little practical use of his artistic talents
but, secretly, he has compiled a solid professional knowledge.
He is phobically afraid of being offensive and avoids even the
slightest dispute with his friends. To H, masculinity and activity
are synonymous with brutality. Still, as a partner he wants an
active and masculine man, properly speaking, preferably a
heterosexual man.
very likely that it draws a good deal of its energy from repressed aggres-
sive impulses and that the exaggerated passivity serves as a reaction
formation against them. As to the seemingly active homosexual man
(Ferenczi's 'object-homoerotic'), who displays an extreme masculinity, it
can be assumed that he has made another turn in the spiral of impulses
and defences and is actually defending himself against the usual
homosexual feminine-masochistic wishes by means of an exaggerated,
sadistic masculinity.
10
LffiiDINAL FIXATIONS
If the character of the homosexual drives are thus identical, we may ask if
the difference in their manifestations in homosexual and paranoid men is
due to their being fixated at different phases in the development of the
drives. As is well known, Freud made an attempt to associate different
types of neuroses and psychoses with different phases of the development
of the libido. In the model of evolution we most often refer to, including
oral, anal, phallic and genital phases, the division of phases reflects
changes in the sources of the drive. In his analysis of Schreber's text
Freud (1911) is instead talking of a development through the phases of
autoerotism, narcissism, homosexuality and heterosexuality, i.e. a
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development of the object of the libido. He states that the paranoiac has
his specific and decisive fixation at the stage of narcissism. A smaller part
of the future paranoiac's libido progresses to the stage of homosexuality
and is sublimated in various ways. Later in life, however, any marked
increase in libidinal impulses may lead to a breakdown of sublimations
and a re-sexualizing of the homosexual object. It is in order to protect
himself from homosexual temptations that the paranoiac is liable to
regress to the narcissistic stage. The withdrawal of the libido from the
object world leads to a hyper-cathexis of the ego, manifesting itself in
delusions of grandeur.
Ever since he was a child, P has believed that he was predestined to
become a remarkable person: a new Jesus, or at least a Jussi Bjorling. At
the beginning of his persecution mania he launched into a frantic detec-
tive work and, before long, .he was convinced that he had got on the track
of an international gang of drug-dealers. He managed to obtain an audi-
ence with a chief of police whenever he wanted, giving lengthy reports on
his discoveries (a combined satisfaction of homosexual and omnipotent
wishes!). Even during analysis, when homosexual impulses are on the
verge of becoming conscious, he occasionally resorts to the rOle of a
private detective, thus providing himself with a feeling of omnipotent
control. Or else he develops grandiose fantasies about the new race of
'psychoanalysed man' who see through everything and should rule the
world.
I have not observed defensive regressions of a similar kind from
homosexuality to narcissism during the analysis of H. Thus we might
conclude that the homosexual has his main fixation at the homosexual
stage of development, and consequently does not run the same risk as the
11
paranoiac of regressing to the narcissistic stage. In actual fact, manifestly
homosexual men usually do not become psychotic. But this is not neces-
sarily due to a relatively milder degree of narcissistic fixation. The
homosexual has other methods at his disposal to escape the dangerous
implications of infantile homosexual wishes and therefore does not need
to regress when confronted with them. By and large I have the impres-
sion that H is just as much at home in narcissistic and autoerotic fantasies
as P. The difference is that H's deep dives into early developmental
stages are less self-destructive and less compulsive than those of P. H
never quite looses sight of reality. So we may, after all, suppose that a
greater part of the libido of H than that of P has reached more mature
developmental stages.
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Since P was a child, he has had the fixed idea that it is extremely
important to keep his hair impeccably cut and combed. Periodi-
cally he spends day and night in front of the mirror, cutting his
hair in great excitement. It is of no less than vital importance to
him that every hair on his head ends up with having exactly the
same length. In order to achieve this he pulls the hairs and
measures them, one by one. Some hair will, of course, always
tum out to be too short, and so he has to start all over again and
cut the rest of them to the same length. Usually he finishes by
being so short-haired that he feels ashamed of his appearance.
12
P's hair-cutting mania has a number of symbolic meanings. Among
others the act is, of course, a masturbation equivalent. As such it strikes
me as being of little enjoyment.
If we try instead to determine the fixation points of the typical
homosexual and the typical paranoiac on the usual developmental scale
ranging from the oral to the oedipal phase, we find once again that it is
not easily settled if they really differ from each other. In a footnote,
added in 1915, to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud
(1905, p. 146) states that anal fixation is a characteristic feature in male
homosexuals. Later experts in homosexuality (Bychowski, 1954) have
stressed oral dependency as another characteristic., In the paranoid per-
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sonality too, both oral and anal features are usually outstanding; the
degree of various libidinal fixations is certainly not measurable, but if we
compare the character of pre-oedipal drive derivatives in H and P, an
unmistakable distinction comes into sight.
The masochistic mode of anality has gained the upper hand. Moreover,
in H's collection of masochistic fantasies, aggression has entered into a
rather stable liaison with libido. The stability may partly be ascribed to a
propensity for sexualizing aggression, specific for the perverse personal-
ity. The anality of P is of a less enjoyable kind. The sadistic mode pre-
vails, clearly manifesting itself in a magnificent control system, adaptable
to everything and everybody in the surroundings. In a paper on the
Schreber case, Chasseguet-Smirgel (1966) has pointed out that the para-
noiac's conspicuous anal defensive system with all its systematization,
intellectualization, rationalization an,P general rigidity is fundamentally
mobilized with the purpose of keeping persecutors at bay - an impossible
undertaking because every evil that has been projected will inevitably
find its way back to where it belongs. secondarily, however, the anal
character traits will furnish narcissistic supplies, i.e. anality enters into
the service of narcissism. What P is trying to remedy with anal means is
actually very often oral misery.
13
P spends much time planning his economy for years to come.
Before he started his analysis he used to get anything he wanted
from his parents; a new car did not cost him more than a tele-
phone call. At that time he did not bother himself about keep-
ing accounts. When he decided to renounce his parents' gifts,
he was overcome with severe anxiety. Unconsciously he experi-
enced the change as a loss of omnipotence shared with his
parents, and dreaded starving to death. The scrupulous plan-
ning served to keep anxiety in check.
different extent. Even here one gets the impression that P is moving at a
considerably more primitive level than H, who thinks and talks according
to the laws of secondary process most of the time. Nevertheless H has a
confusing tendency to contradict himself without discovering it. Espe-
cially when delicate matters are brought op, he may show strange defects
in logical thinking; the pleasure principle wins the victory and primary
processes come to the fore. If someone else points out his logical error he
does not, like most neurotics, show any surprise or need of clarification.
As opposites do not exclude each other according to his logical code, they
can be left side by side. This perversion of an ego-function (i.e. thinking)
is no doubt connected with his special, perverse solution of a basic con-
flict, to which I shall return later. P, on the other hand, thinks and talks in
analysis according to the primary process almost all the time. Connec-
tions are established in the same way as in the unconscious, by means of
similarity and contiguity, and they are easily destroyed on the request of
the pleasure principle. The human body with its organs, especially the
lower ones, is amply represented in thoughts and vocabulary.
The varying use of primary process thinking is, together with the diffe-
rent amount of free, not neutralized aggression, responsible for a very
different atmosphere in the analytic hours with H and P. In the analysis
of H a playful mood is prevailing. During the hours with P the atmos-
phere is gloomy.
14
Fear, suspicion, hatred and desperation mingle in the emana-
tions of P. The analytic dialogue is turned into a lawsuit without
mercy. Every intervention on my part, including occasional
noises of an empty stomach, are pondered over and scrutinized
as potential proofs of my untrustworthiness. In me, P's efforts
of sadistic control awake counter-transference fantasies that are
at times amazingly cruel.
After all we seem to have some evidence for believing that the mind of
a paranoiac is tuned in to an 'earlier' or 'more primitive' way of function-
ing than that of the typical homosexual, even if it is difficult to define the
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So far I have been dealing with pre-oedipal features, which are pro-
nounced in both the paranoid and the homosexual personality. Still, as is
well-known, many symptoms and character traits are formed after a
regression and in order to escape a conflict on a higher level. To Freud it
was self-evident that all analytic material should be examined from the
oedipal viewpoint. As far as I know, he never asked himself if some
individuals might perhaps get stuck in earlier phases and never advance
15
as far as to the oedipal conflict (with the possible exception of women,
with regard to whom he had his doubts in later years (Freud 1931, p.
226)). Concerning the paranoid president Schreber, Freud (1911, p. 55)
plainly states: "Thus in the case of Schreber we find ourselves once again
on the familiar ground of the father-complex", meaning that Schreber's
passive homosexual attitude to his father is in fact one of the common
and typical solutions of the oedipal conflict in men. Schreber was no
common neurotic, to be sure, but according to Freudian theory his para-
noid psychosis was not a consequence of the weakness of his Oedipus
complex, but rather of the strength of his fixation at the stage of narciss-
ism, with its correspondingly primitive defence mechanisms. The analysis
of the 'Wolf-Man', who might be classed either as a compulsive neurotic,
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16
duties and indoor equipment, and started a long, masochistic
(Platonic) love-affair with his elder brother. His father, who
was successful in professional life, but somewhat withdrawn at
home, is considered by H to be a complete zero.
H substituted his brother for his father, probably because the brother
was, after all, felt to be a less overwhelming rival. Otherwise it is an
oedipal drama of the well-known type: a play for three persons about
hatred and love, men and women. H is cognizant of the rules of the
game, even though his solution was deviant.
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The oedipal drama of P bears the imprint of the dyad. The possibility
of making a choice was blurred so as to make it look like a play for two
persons, i.e. P and one single parental figure, plus a vague hope for an
alternative one. The solution of his oedipal conflict was in fact post-
poned. Apparently P had arrived at a positive solution, but some 30 years
later, when he had divorced his wife, the longing for the missing third
person took fire in the shape of a homosexual wish, and it was in fact not
until the time of his psychosis that he arrived at his final (negative)
solution of his Oedipus complex.
17
into one another and the child remains unable to discern more than one
single parental figure. In the cases of Schreber and Strindberg, the
fathers seem to have been vigorous, exacting personalities, whereas the
mothers were submissive and colourless. In the case of P the opposite is
true, but the final outcome is the same; one single phallic-sadistic parent
imago dominates his early representational world. According to Chasse-
guet-Smirgel, the lack of a triangle means that the boy, who has from the
beginning projected his hatred on to the phallic mother, will find no
alternative in the form of a benevolent oedipal father, upon whom he
could project his narcissism or his ego-ideal. Thus he misses the first step
towards the development of his capacity for sublimation. His future
efforts at sublimation - notably of his homosexual libido - are therefore
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18
Because all P's attempts at pha111c display were only fragile defensive
maneuvers against homosexuality, and not the results of real sublima-
tions, all of them have fallen flat and he has lost every interest in them as
soon as he no longer needed them as defences.
When considering what a heavy task it has been for P to remain unaware
of homosexual impulses for so many years, one cannot help thinking that
life should have been comparatively much easier for H, who acknow-
ledged his homosexuality as an adolescent and has lived as a homosexual
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ever since. But this is hardly the case. The pervert does not correspond to
the idea of a happy savage who manages to stick to some infantile satis-
faction because, for some reason, he has not discovered that it is forbid-
den. He too, is trying to avoid something. Manifest homosexuality is a
symptom serving to keep an unconscious conflict at bay. Unfortunately
unstable defence mechanisms are used to such an extent that the
homosexual, in the words of McDougall (1972, p. 379) can be likened to
a person "trying to repair a crumbling wall with scotch tape - it has to be
redone every day".
The dominance of homosexual over heterosexual libido is a conspicu-
ous, common feature in the homosexual and the paranoiac. But if the
function of homosexuality in the individual's system of drives and
defences is examined a little more closely, the resemblance becomes
almost non-existent. The paranoiac defends himself against homosexual-
ity, because it arouses fears of castration, humiliation and annihilation.
The overt homosexual defends himself by means of homosexuality
against other instinctual impulses and anxieties, the nature of which
requires further discussion.
Freud (1905, pp. 145-146) certainly mentions pre-oedipal phenomena
(the operation of narcissistic object choice, a retention of the erotic sig-
nificance of the anal zone and an intense, but short-lived fixation to the
mother) as being important factors determining the future homosexual
man's ceaseless flight from women, but as usual he lays the main stress on
experiences in the phallic and the oedical phase. The sight of the female
sexual organ evokes disgust and castration anxiety in a boy in his phallic
phase, who sees it as a castrated male organ. How the neurotic manages
to overcome his uneasiness is outside the scope of this paper. The fetish-
ist resorts to his fetish as a substitute for the missing organ. The homosex-
19
ual takes refuge in a homosexual object choice in order to escape facing
the existence of creatures without a penis. The psychotic simply denies
his observation, preserving his infantile fantasy of a phallic mother.
Let us return to the manifestly homosexual man's basic conflict and his
way of solving it. In recent years some French psychoanalysts, notably
McDougall (1972) and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1971b, 1974, 1978) have
developed a theory of perverse personality, according to which perver-
sion is formed as a defence against a narcissistic injury in the phallic-
oedipal phase. A boy, who has till then believed that he was his mother's
most important love object and an entirely adequate and satisfying part-
ner to her, discovers at this stage the difference between the sexes and
between the generations. He begins to understand that the female and
the male sexual organs complement each other, and that it is not he but
the father who possesses a male organ of the right size for the mother.
This discovery is to some boys tantamount to a severe narcissistic blow.
20
which she herself has helped him to create. I think, however, that it
should be added that fear of being castrated by the father will probably
also arise, as soon as he is experienced as a rival. It is informative to
compare the ideas of McDougall and Chasseguet-Smirgel with those of
Rank (1923), who sketches a theory on perversion not too dissimilar to
the French theory of the 70s. Only, according to Rank, a boy's funda-
mental reaction to oedipal rivalry is guilt, not shame. Perverse behavior,
he thinks, is a way of denying a sense of guilt due to infantile masturba-
tion, and to 1,1ggression against the oedipal father. According to the
psychoanalysts of those days, most conflicts belonged to the object-libidi-
nal sphere and gave rise to guilt rather than shame. Narcissism as a
problem was considered to pertain mainly to psychotics, not - as now- to
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all of us.
No matter whether the essential motive is guilt or shame, the future
pervert reacts to the trauma of the oedipal setting by idealizing one or
some of his pre-oedipal component instincts (the homosexual his
homosexual libido) at the expense of genitality. The 'correct' solution of
the dilemma would have been idealization of the father, leading to
further sublimations of drives through identifications with changing
father figures. What happens instead is that sublimation processes are
short-circuited, when the homosexual takes himself, i.e. his component
instinct, as his ego-ideal.
21
attempts to arrest the passing of time by behaving like an eter-
nal boy of 18. Past and present hardly exist. The only thing that
counts is the future, which he tries to monopolize by incessantly
transferring his interest to whatever happens to be on the verge
of coming into fashion.
As every anal penis - like H's aesthetic accomplishments, and like the
false nightingale of the emperor of China (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1971b)-
is doomed to failure because of its factitiousness, the homosexual man is,
after all, in his sexual life compelled to hunt the idealized paternal phal-
lus, which can put an end to his feeling of being castrated. According to
22
McDougall (1972) the homosexual act symbolizes a drama of castration
in which the partner, who offers a substitute for the paternal phallus, is at
the same time castrated and repaired. But this castration is controllable
and does not hurt.
To sum up, the homosexual's answer to the oedipal conflict is that
there is no difference between the sexes, no difference between the gen-
erations and no such thing as danger of castration. For very obvious
reasons this is really no solution, but an evasion of the conflict. In fact,
the homosexual rushes through life with the overthrown chess-men
always close on his heels. Freud (1927) writes about the fetishist who
reacts to the discovery of the risk of castration by producing a disavowal
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The homosexual's division of his ego into two parts, one of which follows
the pleasure principle, the other the reality principle, does not establish a
very stable defensive system, but it does, nevertheless, offer, some
advantage as compared with the psychotic's disavowal of the risk of
castration. In the words of McDougall (1972, p. 382): "The psychotic
must recover in delusional form the projected knowledge whose links
have been abolished. The pervert makes a considerable advance on this
position in that he too recovers from the outside what has been lost, but
23
by means of an illusion which he controls and delimits". By means of a
compulsive repetition of his ritual, the homosexual usually manages
pretty well to keep his castration anxiety in check, whereas the future
paranoiac, who has neither managed to solve nor to by-pass his oedipal
conflict, approaches adulthood carrying with him a packet of dynamite,
which is bound to detonate whenever the temperature of his homosexual
libido rises too high.
What then happens when the postponed oedipal conflict is resuscitated
and urges a solution during a paranoid psychosis? As long as the instinc-
tual pressure is kept reasonably low, the latent paranoiac is able to subli-
mate his homosexual libido to "friendship and comradeship, to esprit de
corps and to love in mankind of general", as Freud (1911, p. 61) writes in
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24
fellow patients were simulating their symptoms, and the drugs given to
him by the nurses were just placebo. During this time he was troubled by
mysterious bodily sensations; palpitations, nervous impulses and paroxy-
smal toothache. He suspected that there was something wrong with his
brain too.
P's withering interest in the outer world was, as could be expected,
accompanied by a flourishing occupation with his own body.
At the next stage, i.e. during a fuQy developed psychosis, the para-
noiac has rebuilt the outer world, but he has falsified it by projecting his
homosexual wishes on to the objects in various ways. The original wish
has not vanished, but it is no longer recognizable to himself as his own.
Freud (1911, p. 63) shows how the three typical forms of paranoia are
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The episode illustrates one of the basic patterns of P's psychotic reac-
tions. He is unconsciously in love with the doctor, fancies that his kind
words mean a sexual invitation, instantly changes his love into hatred,
and ends up by feeling persecuted by his love object.
A second way of contradicting the original proposition manifests itself
in erotomania. The paranoiac tries to convince himself that "I do not love
him- I love her, because SHE LOVES ME" (Freud, 1911, p. 63).
25
P imagines that he is extremely attractive to some women.
Many of them start desiring him ardently at first sight. When
his unconscious homosexual feelings were awakened by the
new director, P started a frantic love-affair with a woman who
told him that she needed him tremendously, because two or
three children of hers had died, and because she herself was ill
with cancer and had only a short time left to live. She spurred
him to superhuman sexual performances. P lost his sense of
reality, feeling like the male actor in a new "Love-story".
persecution. P began to suspect that his partner had been sent to him as a
decoy by the gang of drug-dealers organized by the head of his office.
The third prototype of paranoia is delusions of jealousy, expressing the
unconscious formula: "It is not I who love the man - she loves him"
(Freud, 1911, p. 64).
During this period, which came to an end only when the marriage was
annulled, P had no delusions of persecution. The forced confessions of
his wife seem to have provided sufficient nourishment to his homosexual
libido, thus helping him to abstain temporarily from his persecutors.
26
the existence of transitory types is repeatedly affirmed, e.g. (Nunberg,
1938; Freeman, 1955). Certain manifestly homosexual men make use of
projection as a defence mechanism to a considerable extent, and a few of
them develop something like a paranoid psychosis. 'Projection' and
'paranoid reaction' are often carelessly used as if the terms were synony-
mous, but probably one should distinguish between 'simple projection'
on one side, and the mechanisms leading to delusions of persecution on
the other (not to speak of the other main types of paranoid psychosis,
which are the results of still other patterns of projection). What I under-
stand by 'simple projection' is the act of ascribing one's own character
traits, thoughts, wishes etc. (or their sources) to someone else according
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to the motto: what I like is me (or something I do)- what I dislike is you
(or something you do). This concept corresponds roughly to what Freud
means by projection, when he differentiates the purified pleasure ego
from the reality ego (Freud, 1915); see also Laplanche & Pontalis, (1971,
p. 347, 111, 2).
27
At any rate there seems to exist a formal as well as a genetic difference
between the 'simple projection', of which H as well as P make ample use,
and the more complicated and specific one leading to paranoid psychosis.
H has related one single event, which took place one or two years before
he began his analysis, which seems rather similar to a short-lived persecu-
tion mania, indicating that he too may temporarily make use of the more
complex mechanism of projection.
28
reactions. After all, this seems to be the most adequate approach to any
psychoanalytic problem of this type. Outer or inner conditions are not
the causes of an individual's psychic development or behavior. They
influence his choices in an unpredictable way. Consequently we should
not ask why a person acts in a certain way, but rather try to understand
how his actions make sense within his world of fantasies and representa-
tions.
REFERENCES
Bychowski, G. (1954). The structure of homosexual acting out. Psychoanal. Q., 23: 48-61.
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