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‘Even paranoids have enemies’ is the reply Golda Meir is said to have made to Henry Kissinger during the Sinai talks when he accused her of being paranoid for hesitating to grant further concessions to the Arabs. This book, which came out of a conference to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Arbours Association, looks at paranoia and persecution on many levels and aims to inform our thinking on the implications for social and ethical concerns and for clinical practice. The book is divided into three parts. Part I concentrates on the experience for the individual of external and internal persecution and on the therapeutic techniques needed to understand these complex issues. Part II examines paranoid processes in groups, institutions and bureaucracies. Part III looks at these themes in the cultural and political arena and considers moral panic and drugs legislation (Reefer Madness), the subjectivity of racism, machine phenomena in relationships, persecution in post-war Japan and a chapter on paranoia and the peace process. It is from the latter that the title of the book comes.
Throughout this eclectic and provoking set of essays we are moved to ruminate on the solutions to the Zeitgeist of persecution and suspicion at the end of the twentieth century. Salamon Resnik uses a meteorological model to define the atmosphere and tonality of the transference and shows how the emotionally cold climate of the paranoid psychotic renders those in his environment paralysed and frightened. Citing Freud's intuition with Frau P, he shows the importance of Verstehen (understanding rather than explanation) to map out the paranoid landscape. Thus he asks: when do the vision and climate of the world change from neurotic to psychotic? When does misunderstanding (based on otherness) turn into the unmistakable certainty of paranoia? While Bion believed that the weakness of the fact of transference is that it cannot be put into words, Resnik suggests that the climate of the analy