Introduction

Over 35 years ago, I co-organized a group of Mental Health Professionals to lobby in Washington against the Vietnam War and its extension into Cambodia by meeting with senators and congressmen. One of our keynote speakers at a large meeting the night before was Margaret Mead. She came up to me before the meeting and asked, “Dr. Roland, are you head people or feet people?” I was startled. “Are you going down to Washington simply as numbers to protest, or are you using your expertise as mental health professionals to make a point about the war?” I have never forgotten this.

In 2006, we were involved in another disastrous and unnecessary war, with an administration that had exploited the anxieties of the American people after 9/11 to deceive them into the war. As Chair of the Annette Overby Conference at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), I wanted to organize a conference where psychoanalysts would dialogue with social theorists to offer a deeper and more comprehensive view of what was happening in the United States. It became apparent to me soon after organizing the conference that politics and paranoia, and the political exploitation of the public's paranoid anxieties, takes place not only in the United States but also in other countries, and in the past as well. It is a crucial topic that to my knowledge has rarely been explored.

From the psychoanalytic standpoint, I wanted to have major speakers and discussants who could represent two of the most important psychoanalytic theories of paranoia and paranoid anxiety: