Conclusion: Interrelating Politics and Paranoia: The Political Exploitation of Paranoid Anxiety

We are faced with the seeming incongruity, or perhaps even contradiction, that, on the one hand, as psychoanalysts we know that paranoia and paranoid anxieties are generated psychologically from considerable vulnerability in earliest childhood, although there are different psychoanalytic theories as to how this process takes place. Psychoanalysts further know, as our participants have aptly described, that although paranoia and paranoid anxieties sometimes eventuate in psychosis, they are also part and parcel of the human condition. On the other hand, from the sociopolitical side, in the politics of paranoia it is also evident that certain sociopolitical structures, institutions, and ideologies, such as the nation-state, colonialism, slavery (wage and otherwise), and racism, generate and become rife with collective omnipotent fantasies and paranoid projections in the “perpetrators.” Moreover, paranoid thinking can permeate not only political ideologies but the social and biological sciences as well, such as social evolutionism (Brickman, 2003; Gilman, 1993). On occasion, collective victims of an onslaught can later become perpetrators themselves. The content and mechanisms of the paranoia of individuals and collectives are often shared, but the motives can be drastically different.

The papers and roundtable discussions from the conference expound upon individual and group viewpoints in some depth. Thus, we see paranoia and paranoid anxiety on the individual level essentially deriving from the need to defend against vulnerability,