Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Paranoia (Freudian Formulas of)

"Paranoia" is one of the oldest concepts in the history of the description of mental states. It initially appears in Greek tragedy, on two occasions; first to describe the passionate love of Oedipus and Jocasta and then to refer to Orestes' state following his murder of his mother, Clytemnestra.

For most of the 19th century, the term paranoia occupied a position of the same importance as the term "schizophrenia" today. It was then understood as a mental state that was characterized by feelings of persecution on all sides. Freud's approach to paranoia, as to psychopathology in general, brought to it a perspective that is simultaneously dynamic, topographical, genetic, and economic. It is dynamic in that Freud regards paranoia as deriving from a form of psychic activity, namely projection; topographical because this projection, initially connected with incestuous fantasies and later with homosexuality, is based on unconscious impulses; and genetic because the seduction experiences that stimulate these incestuous or homosexual impulses occur at an early stage. Finally, this perspective is also economic in that paranoia, like every other symptom, is an "attempt at reconstruction" directed at protecting the subject from more acute problems.

Freud took an interest in paranoia from the outset of his work, comparing it with other forms of psycho-pathology. His analysis (Freud, 1911c [1910]) of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which contains the essence of his theories on the subject, nevertheless poses a few problems.

The connection between paranoia and homosexuality emerged late in Freud's work. Initially, if homosexual elements were present at all, they were overlooked and it was incestuous relationships or fantasies that were emphasized. In fact, the connection between homosexuality and paranoia seems to have resulted from some collaborative work by Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi. Furthermore, the analysis of homosexuality based on the Memoirs differs from the analysis based on Leonardo da Vinci's childhood memory. Whereas the former involves a romantic fixation on someone of a different sex from the subject, the latter is entirely focused on his relations with someone of the same sex.

What Schreber reveals of the progress of his "nervous illness" demonstrates few of the characteristics of paranoia, or even paraphrenia or paranoid dementia. In fact, he describes the natural and spontaneous development of a psychosis, throughout its progression and in all its forms, without any substantial medical intervention. Instigated by a moment of hypochondria that rapidly turns into a catatonic breakdown, this progression leads him into a paraphrenic phase that gives way to paranoia before concluding in a transvestite perversion with strong hysterical components, which is followed by a rather successful professional reintegration.

Freud incorporates within paranoia the classic forms of delusions of persecution, erotomania, jealous delusions, and megalomania, but he overlooks querulousness and discursive mania. The formulas that Freud puts forward for understanding repression and the return of the repressed in paranoia are problematic in spite of their value. He suggests that a single formula—"I (a man) I love him" is denied in four ways:

1. "I do not love him—I hate him," which is transformed by projection into, "He hates (persecutes) me" (1911c, p. 63), giving rise to delusions of persecution;
2. "I do not love him—I love her." As a result of projection, this becomes: "I observe that she loves me" (p. 63), which leads to erotomania;
3. "It is not I who love the man [or woman]—she [or he] loves him [or her]" (p. 64), which characterizes jealous delusions;
4. "I do not love at all—I do not love any one" (p. 65), which becomes "I love only myself."

Karl Abraham made some variations to these formulae to deal with manic-depressive psychoses. He grafted the essence of formula (a), that is, the inversion of the affect combined with projection, on to formula (d). The formula "I do not love anyone" that Freud proposes is only one of the possible consequences of "I do not love at all"; the other obvious consequence is "I do not love at all—I hate," or even "I hate the whole world," a fantasy that can appear in conjunction with "I love only myself." Schreber's delusion of grandeur in fact portrays a world that has been completely destroyed. Freud explains this fantasy purely in terms of libidinal decathexis but the need for libido to be cathected does not necessarily mean that this concerns the ego. The libido can disperse, with "I hate the whole world" being extended into "including myself." Schreber attempted suicide and asked to be killed.

Finally, formula (d) can also appear in another form in delusions of grandeur: "I do not love anyone—I love the whole world," which is expressed in the delusions of mystics concerning the salvation of humanity and the transformation of the world, which also appear in the Memoirs.

There is a further equation of this: "I love the whole world, but the world hates me," which is expressed in paranoid masochism, when hatred presents itself as the guarantee of a supreme love.

The application of the formula for delusions of persecution (a) to the formula for jealous delusions (c) concerns the subject's feeling of persecution by the couple of whom he is jealous. The complete formula here is: "It is not I who love the man and the woman—it is they who love each other. I hate them"; and, by projection, "it is they who hate me," who despise me and so on.

The formula (b) applied to formula (c) produces "It is not I who love the man and the woman—it is they who love me," a fantasy that is not unusual in erotic delusions, particularly in the form that leads to the "ménageà trois," whether preceding or following the jealousy, the pleasurable aspect of which barely conceals the anxiety. Daniel Lagache pioneered the study of the connection between erotomania and jealousy, as well as the study of ideas of homosexual infidelity in jealousy.

There is also the application of formula (a) to formula (b) and vice versa, as elaborated by Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira. In the first case, the formula for homosexual erotomanic delusion appears as: "I (a man) love him (a man)" and by projection: "I do not love him—he loves me," a fantasy that emerges clearly in Schreber's Memoirs and in clinical practice. In the second case, there is a close connection both between jealousy and erotomania and between erotic delusions and feelings of persecution. If these formulae are then applied to each other: "I love her (a woman). No, I hate her," and by projection, "I observe that she hates me," the woman appears as the man's persecutor, just as the man can appear as the woman's persecutor. These observations, entirely based on the wide range of phenomena in clinical practice, are an extension of the foundation constituted by Freud's work.

These developments as a whole illustrate the heuristic innovativeness of Freud's and they encompass a much broader spectrum of possibilities in the clinical field. Freud's for understanding paranoia also gave rise to the concept of foreclosure, developed by Lacan as a result of an error in the early French translations and initially accepted as an adequate basis alone for understanding the psychoses.

At very early stage, Freud drew a distinction between three variations of repression: repression concerning affect alone; repression concerning mental representation alone; or, finally, in the most extreme case, concerning both affect and mental representations, in which all the processes occur outside the ego. In his early studies on paranoia, each of these forms of repression found an outlet in projection. In his Schreber study, Freud uses the term Verwerfung (foreclosure or repudiation) to characterize the third form of repression. Freud's first translators into French had simply—and incorrectly—retained the term "projection" Lacan, seeing this as a flagrant mistranslation and connecting it with his work on the symbolic law, introduced the term "foreclosure" (forclusion) in its place. In an everyday linguistic system such as Freud used, the term would have been better translated into French by the concept of "rejet" or "refus" ("rejection" or "refusal"), which is more closely reflected in the alternative English term repudiation. The correction of this translation error at the origin of the concept of foreclosure has certainly indicated a difficulty concerning the formation of psychoses and today this term is as widely accepted as the term "projective identification" which originates from Tausk's writings.

LUIZ EDUARDO PRADO DE OLIVEIRA