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Even Paranoids Have Enemies explores the relationship between paranoia as a state of mind and persecution as an external reality. The title is a quote from Golda Meir in response to Henry Kissinger during the Sinai peace talks, and sets the context for the subsequent chapters in linking intrapsychic, interpersonal, group and international factors in the development of paranoid and persecutory processes. The book arose from a conference at the Arbours Association in London, and comprises a collection of essays, predominantly written from a psychoanalytic perspective, with contributions from psychiatrists, a businessman, and a playwright, from a range of cultural backgrounds.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 concentrates on paranoid and persecutory phenomena at an individual level. It comprises five chapters, the first of which gives a developmental account of paranoia, both as a defence which may, in extreme forms, result in psychosis, but is also part of normal development and an aspect of the normal personality. Chapters on work with victims of torture and with children of Holocaust survivors describe vividly extreme forms of persecution, which exist in external reality. Devastating events in history are linked with the existing object relations of the individual, and emphasise the importance of this in our work as psychotherapists in trying to understand the meanings of a real situation of persecution for the individual concerned. The chapters of this section are fascinating and painful, and powerfully make the case for the importance of linking the internal world with the external world in a range of settings, affecting individuals as diverse as Judge Schreber and Brian Keenan.
Part II widens the arena to look at paranoid and persecutory processes in groups. The first chapter, by Otto Kernberg, is a fascinating and evocative account of the regressive power of groups to activate extreme primitive defences in the individual, with regression to paranoid-sc