The term "persecution" derives from the vocabulary of religion and was used to describe the torture and torments inflicted on the early Christians martyrs. In everyday usage, it characterizes all relationships in which one party, the persecutor, pursues the other, the persecuted, with malevolent intentions, cruelty, and hatefulness.

In the language of psychopathology, the term "delusions of persecution" has been used to refer to the ideas and feelings described in patients with various diagnoses, including paranoia, schizophrenia, melancholia, and hypochondria. Freud's hypothesis is that a delusion of persecution is the result of a defense against unconscious homosexual impulses.

Described since antiquity, feelings and ideas of persecution were noted in connection with various clinical entities until the second half of the nineteenth century, when new systems of psychiatric classification isolated them into a separate and independent category (Legrand du Saule, 1871). In the early twentieth century, German psychiatry characterized persecution in relation to "paranoia" while French authors dismissed what they called folie raisonnante; even though it was clear that other pathologies (for example, the paranoid form of dementia praecox) could include this type of delusional thinking.

Today, clinicians tend to recognize the persecution dimension in a number of conditions, including erotomania, delirious hypochondria, or delirious jealousy; these conditions do not actually reach the level of "delusions of persecution" in the strict sense of the term, but all involve essential aspects of the persecutory relationship—projection, passionate and one-sided attachment, and acting out.

In his commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber's autobiography (1911c), Freud described the mechanism of symptom formation, the underlying unconscious fantasy, and the level of fixation of a persecutory relationship. He saw the onset of the disorder in "sexualization of their social instinctual cathexes" (p. 62) and suggested that these cathexes are the result of inhibition of homosexual tendencies (the erotic component of friendship) arising from the stage when object choice is narcissistic. The unconscious fantasy of the persecutory relationship thus represents the fixation to this homosexual stage of the libido.

Finally, to explain the way that symptoms of persecution develop, Freud suggested the specific mechanism of "projection." The impossibility of accepting "I (a man) love him (a man)" is unconsciously transformed into "I hate him." But this formulation, representing the return of the repressed, cannot become conscious in such form and Freud writes that, "thus the impelling unconscious feeling makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external perception. 'I do not love him—I hate him, because he persecutes me"' (p. 63).

Delusions of persecution represented Freud's first attempt to identify certain mental pathologies with reference to psychic mechanisms other than repression and the "return of the repressed."

VASSILIS KAPSAMBELIS

See also: Act, passage to the; Anxiety; Delusion; Double, the; Helplessness; Internal object; Megalomania; "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia"; Paranoia; Paranoid-schizoid position; Privation; "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paraniodes)"; Psychoses, chronic and delusional.