Greenspan presents an analysis of letters written by a woman patient to a hospital where she was confined from 1917 to 1920. The letters cover a span of forty-two years. During all of this time the patient suffered from paranoid delusions that she was a victim of persecution by a 'community movement'. The content of these letters offers clear support for Freud's hypothesis that in paranoia the original persecutor is a person of the same sex toward whom the patient has had a strong sexual attraction. In the present case the letters clearly depict the patient's original attachment to her mother, defended against by ideas of persecution which in turn were extended onto others by virtue of their relationship to the mother.