Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [25]
The word paranoia was given to us by the Greeks, who gave us many other great words like chaos, asparagus, and Philadelphia. The Greeks seem to have had a particular knack for medical words, perhaps because of the influence of the famous Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine. Para is Greek for “beside,” and nous is Greek for “mind.” Thus, paranoia literally meant “beside one’s mind,” i.e., nuts. Hippocrates used the term to describe the delirium associated with a high fever.
The concept disappeared during the Dark Ages, along with many other clever Greek ideas. Medieval health care providers often regarded madness as a manifestation of demonic influence and treated it with holy water, the sign of the cross, foul-smelling brews, and exuberant Latin curses; for example, “Thou lustful and stupid one . . . thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly ... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen! . . . Loathsome cobbler . . . dingy collier . . . perfidious boar . . . envious crocodile . . . malodorous drudge . . . wounded basilisk” and so on.1
The Europeans went on cursing demons for a millennium or so before finally concluding in the 1700s that Hippocrates might have been onto something after all. By the late 1800s, they had moved beyond the Greeks, establishing the field of psychiatry. The new psychiatrists reworked the old Greek concept of paranoia by narrowing its application to a specific kind of delusion in which the victim believes that he is being persecuted. They diagnosed the affliction as a symptom of psychosis, yet another Greek word. To the ancient Greeks, psychosis meant “animation, the spirit of life,” but psychiatrists redefined it less poetically as a mental derangement characterized by loss of contact with reality.2
“He Hates (Persecutes) Me”
Building on the psychiatric tradition in the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud chose a psychotic German judge named Daniel Paul Schreber for the subject of his seminal analysis of paranoia, The Schreber Case. Among many other delusions, Daniel Schreber believed that his physician, Dr. Flechsig, was gradually transforming him into a woman in order to sexually abuse him and that God planned to inseminate him with the seeds of a new human race once the transformation was complete. Freud, being Freud, concluded that Schreber’s paranoia was a manifestation of repressed homosexual lust for his father.3
[WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH CONTAINS A HIGH CONCENTRATION
OF WHAT IS POPULARLY KNOWN AS PSYCHOBABBLE.
TIMID READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO SKIP IT. YOU MAY SAFELY READ THE
FOOTNOTE, HOWEVER, AS IT IS AMUSING AND SCATOLOGICAL.]
According to Freud’s interpretation, Schreber had transferred his latent homosexual longings for his father onto his physician, Dr. Flechsig. But since these desires were deeply disturbing to Schreber, he repressed them and subconsciously concluded, “I do not love him—Indeed I hate him.” The feeling of hatred, however, was also disturbing to Schreber because it contradicted the love that he actually felt for Flechsig and, indirectly, his father. To compensate for the resulting anxiety, Schreber then projected his own feelings of hatred onto Flechsig. Freud wrote, “He hates (persecutes) me, which will entitle me to hate him.” Finally, Schreber’s sexually frustrated subconscious directed his thwarted libidinal impulse inward, resulting in narcissism (i.e., self-love) and the megalomaniacal delusion that God would impregnate him with the seeds of a new human race.ab
HAVING DEMONSTRATED his irrefutable conclusion in the Schreber case, Freud acknowledged that one would need to consult a large number of cases in order to confidently apply the findings to paranoia in general. He then proceeded to confidently apply the findings to paranoia in general.
Freud’s