Just because they’re after you, don’t mean you’re not paranoid
I think I was about twenty years old when I first encountered the saying, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.’
Pinned to the bed by mushrooms, the furious drums and guitars of Nirvana’s ‘Territorial Pissings’ streaming past me in the dark, this sentiment appeared to my then-melodramatic sense of neurosis as a deliciously heightened form of paranoia. Even as you gained some measure of self-possession through recognising and gaining distance from your distorted mentality — as you recognised your paranoia — this self-possession was ripped away by a further recognition: of reality’s callous independence, its potential to still actually prey on you even if your fears are rooted in apparent illusion. The potential for illusion and reality to coincide undermines the security of the distinction between them.
The words originate in Joseph Heller’s classic paranoid novel of contradictory traps, Catch-22, which I’d not read and still haven’t. At that age, my literary reference point for my deepening appreciation of suspicion and madness was William S. Burroughs, famed for saying that a paranoid is ‘someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on.’ Burroughs’ take certainly appealed my ongoing intiation out of society, wherein the madness of the individual is reframed through inversion as a sane response to social insanities. But important as this initiation is, its simplicity loses something of Heller’s formulation, of the curious and infuriating hall of mirrors opened up by slippage and coincidence between psyche and reality.
Over the years since then, I’ve come to be fascinated by this formulation, and I’ve casually accumulated associations between it and a number of other apparently similar perspectives. Here I want to think them through a bit, to clarify — even if the only thing clarified is my confusion.
Heller’s formulation can be applied to the random coincidence of paranoia and actual persecution. Of course, for the paranoid, few — if any — coincidences are random. We might say that when ‘true randomness’ is perceived and accepted, it simply becomes a pure, generalised form of paranoia: impossibly, the world is against you, even in its most contingent depths. Again, in this scenario the actual ‘persecution’ might forgo any specific ‘they’ who are after you — and become all the more paranoid. Circumstances conspire, things ‘just go wrong’. There’s a cursed feeling that never objectifies.
For me, one upshot of Heller’s formulation is that my approach to calming myself down in paranoid moments can become more extreme. For instance, I’m not a bad flyer, but when I do get real jitters, some inner turbulence triggered by outer turbulence, reassuring myself with flight safety stats and the knowledge that I sometimes get the jitters often doesn’t cut it. The tiny percentage of flight casualities doesn’t help if you’re in that tiny percentage, and occasionally getting flight fear doesn’t mean you’re not going to crash. So I have to imagine the worst and make my peace with that.
Of course this is ultimately a little trick I play on myself — the imagining needs enough reality to work, but overshooting the mark could be disastrous.
In any case, the way out is through.
If we consider situations where there is a ‘they’ who may or may not be after us, proximity to them can complicate things. What if they know us well enough to know about our propensity for paranoia? What if they exploit this knowledge in attacking us?
I think this brings us into the arena of ‘gaslighting’, where one person tries to manipulate and control another by convincing them they’re losing their mind. In the 1938 play Gas Light, from which the term derives, a husband secretly dims and brightens a gas-powered light while insisting to his wife that she’s imagining these changes. I’ve not seen the play or either of the film adaptations, so can’t comment on the nuances of that situation, but to my mind the most potent form of this involves a victim who is less than mentally stable to begin with. Their fragility is exploited by the manipulator, and they’re perhaps trapped all the more effectively through trying to deny their weakness. ‘I’m not insane, I’m not imagining this,’ is the most obvious form of resistance. But in its simplicity, in its flat contradiction of their pre-existing imbalance, this denial may paradoxically heighten the potency of this imbalance — and feed into the manipulator’s ploy.
More effective, perhaps, is a form of psychic jiu-jitsu which fully acknowledges one’s imbalance while also working to expose the very real attacks. Heller’s formulation, curiously, comes to underpin a form of self-defence against gaslighting: ‘Sure I’m paranoid, but that doesn’t mean you’re not attacking me.’ Of course, nothing is simple here, and to be effective, such forms of defence necessitate an ongoing accumulation of self-awareness and confidence amid fragility: the ability to entertain the independence of psyche and reality even as their coincidence is wielded against you. But in some sense, awareness that we might be paranoid and under attack can function to help us better deal with such attacks. We accommodate the hall of mirrors, making a shifting home in it, rather than trying to run straight outside and ending up bleeding on a floor of broken glass.
There seem to be dynamics resonant with all of this in the phenomenon of projection. The basic situation here is an inability to tolerate a negative internal feeling, which is disavowed by projecting it out, onto an third party. Implicit in this seems to be the ‘innocence’ of the third party — the person doing the projecting is where the negativity is located.
I always thought this seemed too simplistic, and wondered if a distorting factor could be seen in an obvious source for the metaphorical image — the technology of the cinema, which arose precisely around the time that psychoanalysis was theorising the psychological mechanism.
In cinema, images internal to the projector are cast forth onto a blank screen. Did we absorb from this the idea of the other who is projected onto as being ‘innocent’ of the projections? But if disavowal is the core of psychological projection, wouldn’t it work best if the ‘screen’ (the other person) was precisely not blank? If I can’t abide the anger I feel, and project it, if the other person is completely bereft of anger, it would be much harder to disavow it than if they are actually also angry. ‘But they are angry!’ then becomes both true and part of my delusion about myself. A truth makes the delusion all the more potent — a deeply tricksy pincer move.
However bound by the prejudices of his milieu, Freud’s mind was undoubtedly a subtle one, and it was ultimately no surprise to track down his actual words on this subject and find that he saw this exact dynamic at work.
We begin to see that we describe the behaviour of both jealous and persecutory paranoics very inadequately by saying that they project outwards onto others what they do not wish to recognize in themselves. Certainly they do this; but they do not project it into the blue, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn from their own. Our jealous husband perceived his wife’s unfaithfulness instead of his own; by becoming conscious of hers and magnifying it enormously he succeeded in keeping his own unconscious.1
Does the fact that ‘knowledge of the unconscious’ is part of the mental armoury of this pincer move suggest that the advent of psychoanalysis both exposed and empowered it? The hall of mirrors becomes the site of a psychological arms race.
In any case, Freud was certainly not the pioneer here that he appears to be at first glance. Maybe you were quicker than me to recognise in the above example of the jealous husband some of the best-known words of someone from a couple of millennia ago:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, ‘Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,’ and behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)
In Freud, ‘casting out the beam of thine own eye’ becomes ‘withdrawing one’s projections’ — surely a critical part of the training of a therapist, so they might see more clearly when pulling out the motes (or beams) in their patients’ eyes.
Other associations I’ve casually made around Heller’s formulation have proved less fruitful when I got round to following them up.
When I came across this Jacques Lacan quip, I thought it must have something to do with Heller’s words:
A madman isn’t just a beggar who thinks he’s a king — he’s also a king who thinks he’s a king.
The king who thinks he’s a king being ‘mad’ suggested a certain resonance with the convergence of truth and insanity, actual persecution and fantastical paranoia. However, Lacan is speaking of something a little different. The source is his 1946 ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. Žižek cites the quip during a discussion of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism.2 In fact, it arises in response to something Marx himself said: ‘… one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.’ From this perspective, the Lacanian quip isn’t talking about a coincidence of truth and madness, but about a madness of a more usual sort, a kind of false interpretation of reality, or a slippage between different levels of life. When a king really believes he is a king, he is prey to an insidious over-valuation of social roles, an over-valuation that is a form of blindness. This is a madness that we all slip into habitually, king or not.
Another thread I wanted to discuss, which is very rich but doesn’t add a great deal to the Heller formulation, is the idea of projecting good rather than bad qualities.
Why would someone want to disavow something good they find in them? For Robert Johnson, whose Inner Gold is one of the key books for the lay person on this topic, projecting good is part of maturation. While we’re not yet ready to take full possession of our inner power, we project it onto a teacher or mentor figure. Part of the art of the role of the mentor is to recognise this, and to skilfully enable the withdrawal of projection at the right time — a withdrawal which amounts to the protégé coming into their own power. It reminds me of what Nietzsche wrote in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (Schopenhauer being an inspirational figure for the young Nietzsche, from whom he would withdraw his projections soon enough after writing these words):
Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now…
Of course, especially in our chaotic world, maturation is never a linear or simple process, enabling precious freedoms from tradition and befuddling confusions. And the fact that it’s less obvious that we would disavow and project the good in us perhaps sometimes makes this dynamic a slippery one to catch sight of.
As to the Heller aspect, this goes back to the false idea of a blank screen in projection. We will almost always project our good qualities onto someone who indeed possesses those qualities: they will simply have those qualities, in our eyes, inflated into an almost magical aura (think of the worship of pop stars as an extreme example). The Heller aspect is the coincidence of mental distortion and reality: the disavowal of aspects of oneself via a genuine facet of another person.