Enmity

Distrust

Distrust refers to a way of thinking about others in which there exists a gradation of intensities.

At the lightest level, the IGP attributes to others an innate malice or a propensity to harm, to cause injury, which advises caution. The other is a dangerous being. This view applies to the human species in general and to some of its specimens in particular.

At the next level, the IGP attributes to its enemy certain specific hostile intentions: not only is the other potentially dangerous, but they would already be thinking about how to cause harm in one way or another.

Finally, it is assumed that the enemy has already done the damage, that hostile actions have already materialized in reality. And even if one has not seen it with one's own eyes, it is possible to deduce it because there is evidence of it.

At all three levels, depending on the firmness of the conviction, it may be a matter of a simple suspicion or a more or less solid certainty.

It is indeed true that the tendency toward making poorly grounded attributions appears to be a relatively universal human characteristic.

"Studies on 'attribution' have made evident to what extent, when we judge the behavior of other humans, we tend to simplify its causes and to regard it as motivated, rather than relating it to circumstances or chance" (36).

In IP individuals, this tendency toward the gratuitous attribution of motivations (or of supposed accomplished facts) appears to be somewhat exaggerated.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach Test.

"Responses of a schizo-paranoid shade complex.

[...] Persons with facial gestures expressing intentionality..." (63).

Paranoid personality.

"[...] tendency observed in paranoid individuals to reject the 'obvious' interpretations of others' actions, and to seek the underlying 'real' meaning" (5).

Furthermore, and in accordance with the dichotomous cognitive style characteristic of the PI, the latter tends to polarize their attributions in such a way that they usually see good intentions and positive attitudes where none actually exist or, quite the contrary, glimpse animosity where what exists is an indifferent or neutral attitude. The first bias, far less evident and less well known, will be discussed later. The second distortion of reality is the one that concerns us at this moment.

Membership in the PCG also, insofar as it induces a state of paranoidization, simultaneously increases the tendency toward distrust.

Sokagakkai.

"A more objective study conducted in Tokyo in 1965 by Dator indicates the contrary: 56% of a sample of Gakkai members scored low on 'trust in people', as opposed to 40% of Dator's sample of believers in some religion and 39% of those who denied belonging to any religion. Gakkai members also scored lower on 'trust in people' than any other subsample of believers from other religious groups included in Dator's data" (84).

In the case of Sokagakkai, this distrustful attitude is instilled in members openly and without equivocation.

Sokagakkai.

"We, who embrace the highest of all religions, must understand that persecutions also await us…" (34).

Sokagakkai.

"One age succeeds another. Just like the weather, our times are sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the future we will probably have to face storms of adversity and turmoil" (35).

Sokagakkai.

"Then, Toda intrigued the young people listening to him by saying: -I propose that we meet here again in exactly ten years. At that time, I will have something important to ask you. The campaign for kosen-rufu has just begun. Right now everything seems to be relatively calm, but we cannot expect this situation to last. The three powerful enemies will rise in our path without fail. They will soon attack, and we must not succumb to them" (34).

A mistaken forecast that, as tends to happen in cult groups, did not lead the militants to doubt their leaders or the organization.

With these teachings, it seems understandable that Sokagakkai militants score low on "trust in others." But indoctrination in theories that explicitly entail distrust of others is by no means essential for this to increase, since it depends, ultimately, on paranoid contagion itself.

Thus, both the paranoid individual and the member of the paranoid contagion group think that the other is not to be trusted, that they harbor hostile intentions or have already acted on them. But what are these intentions or hostile acts, what do they consist of? The grievances of distrust form a repertoire that does not change excessively depending on cultural or historical context, nor depending on whether paranoidization has an individual or collective dimension. Paranoid suspicions and accusations can be grouped into a few broad recurring themes: harm, damage, nuisance, injury, and misappropriation.

In parallel, the clinic reveals a set of accusations, also recurring, relating not to what the enemies do but to how they do it. The enemies hide, lie and collude with each other.

A third bias introduced by paranoid distrust concerns the nature of the enemies, upon whom the PCG confers an excessive size and power.

Damage

Sectarian groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"In Indiana we were always hearing proclamations of KuKu-Klux-Klan vengeance. Jones said they were going to put us all in concentration camps, and that the Government intended to replicate Hitler's torments of the Jews upon us" (42).

Sometimes it is not enough for the enemy to torture — they want to kill.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"They are trying to liquidate him, to suppress him by force..." (41).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Upon admission, the mother expressed the conviction that she and her daughter had been admitted to be executed" (15).

Human communities too can feel themselves in mortal danger, threatened by enemies to whom they attribute murderous intentions.

Serbian nationalism.

"[...] the Serbian warlords stormed Muslim towns and killed their inhabitants to ensure that the latter would never have the opportunity to kill Serbs [...]

That the idea of killing Serbs had not crossed the mind of the Croatian government, let alone the Bosnian one, carries little weight in the course of events" (77).

Accusations of poisoning are among the most characteristic features of paranoid individuals, who notice strange flavors in drinks and food, which leads them to suspect that these contain some poison, placed with the aim of making them ill or killing them.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- First I noticed things in the drink... then that they were spraying sprays into the air... I noticed it because I felt irritation and a burning sensation.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"She feels in her mouth something like a saffron taste that makes her feel dull and on edge; she has also found saffron in her food" (49).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"She also declares having had in 1868 a serious illness, brought on with the help of some powders that momentarily paralyzed her son and herself" (49).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"Her food has a rather suspicious taste; her dining companion fell ill after accidentally drinking from the glass that had been meant for her" (41).

Lasègue's persecution delusion. Clinical case.

"They tried to poison her with a pastry..." (48).

The paranoid contagion groups also provide us with examples of the propensity to fantasize about poisonings.

Maoist Leninism.

"When I began to explain that in June 1976 Chairman Mao was gravely ill, General Xu Shiyou suddenly stood up and moved toward me in a threatening manner.

- Why were there black and bluish spots on the Chairman's body? -he exclaimed as he stood before me. -What was the cause? -There is a popular belief in China that bruises always appear on the body of someone who has been poisoned.

I tried to explain it to him.

-In the last days of his life, the president could barely breathe. He suffered from a severe lack of oxygen. That is why the bruises appeared.

-In my whole life I have fought in many battles and I have seen many dead -said Xu challenging me-. But I have never seen anyone in that state. When on the ninth of September I saw the bruises on the president's body, I asked you how many ga ma he had, but you did not know how to answer me. I am convinced that the president was poisoned. Only poison could have produced marks like those. We must interrogate the doctors and the nurses to discover who poisoned the president" (20).

Mao himself had already expressed his fears that someone might have poisoned one of the pools of the mansions where he was staying.

Another form of harm is sexual abuse.

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"Anal penetration, penetration from behind, taking advantage of carelessness or "illusory trust," is one of the fundamental fears in the paranoid relationship" (79).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Although she was reasonable when it came to matters of interest, in her perception of family life, she ceased to be so. Living with her father, this unfortunate woman was always a source of distress for the poor old man. How many absurd acts of immorality did she not impute to him; how many written complaints did she not address to the authorities to have them protect her from him; how many visits to men of business did she not make to tell them of her imaginary concerns!

Mr. X., the father, was accused by her of having committed an enormous outrage against her and her sister. After making her take a narcotic, Mr. X. would have brought into her room, she does not know how (for her door was always locked from the inside), the subprefect of X., who would have satisfied his passions with her; a pregnancy would have followed, whose term Miss X. awaited for nearly two years. A shirt was found at her home with a note that read: 'Shirt that I was wearing on the fatal night of...' (49).

The current epidemic of pseudo-memories (or so it seems) of alleged past rapes, occurring mainly in the context of exalted religious groups and alternative psychotherapeutic settings, could reflect the same paranoid dynamic as the delusion of those two sisters who lived in the nineteenth century.

There is a harm that is not physical, but moral, and which is inflicted, for example, through mockery.

Sectarian groups. Community Chapel.

"Pastor Barnett would tell his flock: you will be the object of laughter, of mockery. You will find that there is hatred against you coming from the world of the church. You are sheep among wolves..." (24).

Prejudice

Obviously, the enemy is not limited to killing or physically harming, but can work to make circumstances turn adverse and to hinder the achievement of one's goals.

Here is a concrete example of these prejudices that respect the bodily integrity of the IP.

Erotomania.

"If she loses her occupation and if musicians come to play in the restaurants, if her family has quarreled with her, all of that occurs, up to now, under the exclusive influence of the officer" (11).

Psychometric tests also show us, in some of the responses, that IPs tend to attribute their own failures to the obstacles placed by others in their path.

Paranoid personality.

"Tends to feel... a victim" (83).

Paranoia. Aimée case.

"Indeed, he thinks that newspaper has been subsidized to oppose his beneficent mission" (45).

Among the characteristic suspicions and accusations is that of sowing discord and poisoning relations within the group itself. Ultimately, the enemy seeks its destruction.

Maoist Leninism.

"They will continue to conspire to fight the Chinese people by every possible means. For example, they will surreptitiously send their agents into our country to sow discord and provoke unrest" (53).

Erotomania.

"[...] if her family has quarreled with her, all of that occurs, up to now, under the exclusive influence of the officer" (11).

In a similar manner, the erotomaniac patient interprets that she cannot consummate her love with the Object due to the obstacles placed in their way by hidden enemies.

Erotomania.

"The persecutions have no purpose other than the separation from the Object" (11).

Nuisance

Another of the accusations that the PPI tends to level against people in their environment is that they make gestures, or grimaces, or emit sounds whose intention is to cause annoyance. PIs often prove particularly intolerant of noises, from which they construct their persecutory delusions.

Erotomania.

"[...] if the musicians come to play in the restaurants, [...] under the exclusive influence of the officer" (11).

Folie à six. Case of the Austrian hairdresser.

"The first mild symptoms appeared after the family moved to a new apartment in 1976. The family living above them had a new baby, and Mrs. A was extraordinarily disturbed by the child's crying. She complained to the neighbors and the two families began to have confrontations. The situation progressed to the point where she hired a lawyer. The dispute dragged on for several years. In 1980 Mrs. A developed mild delusional symptomatology, believing that they were making noise on purpose" (19).

Defamation

One specific form of harm that the enemy frequently resorts to is the spreading of slanders that tarnish the image of integrity so prized by the PIG.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"His wife has spread the rumor that he was handing over my daughter so they could eat" (49).

Paranoia.

"Slanders are being spread about him, he has contracted a nervous disease as a consequence of excesses, he is syphilitic, addicted to pederasty. His photograph was sent to brothels to make him appear as a regular customer; forged invoices were published as if he were drinking large quantities of alcohol daily" (41).

Lasègue's persecutory delusion. Clinical case.

"[...] they accuse me of having stolen..." (48).

Lasègue's persecutory delusion. Clinical case.

"An alienated woman sees a dress hanging from the neighboring window; she assumes that they have tried to mock her, and that it is one more misdeed by the people who have been insulting her for so long..." (48).

Also in psychometric tests, IPs acknowledge thinking that others say insulting and false things about them. And, as is to be expected, PCGs voice the same complaint.

J.O.N.S.

"Let the significance of the Party be spread with neatness and purity, avoiding those confusions with which we are today being slandered…" (50).

Sokagakkai.

"[...] cunning and arrogant monks who, although they still have much to learn about Buddhism, will boast of having attained the highest truth and will slander the devotees of the Lotus Sutra…" (40).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"We are the heralds of forgotten truths, sometimes guiltily forgotten, sometimes deceitfully forgotten; and we will continue to be so even under the grapeshot of insults and slanders…" (12).

Misappropriation

In the fourth place, suspicion leads the paranoid contagion group to think that its enemy wants to steal from it or has already stolen from it, whether money or riches…

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"The clergy is involved in the matter, the succession exists, but I am being robbed because of the priests. Everywhere it is said that the archbishop wants us to renounce" (49).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"[...] at the time of their grandfather's death. He, before dying, had revealed the existence of a treasure in a certain house that he indicated to them, but without pointing out the exact location. The priest discovered the hiding place and stole the treasure; the first theft took place in 1866" (49).

Sectarian Groups. Hermetic Philosophical Institute.

"Their parasitic mentalities drive them to devise different ways to usurp goods or assets from those who produce or possess them, in order to satisfy their personal needs by dispossessing the hardworking, creative, and intelligent achievers" (4).

Italian Fascism. Clinical case.

"Taking advantage of the language of the revolutionary syndicalists (discussed further ahead), he called Italy a 'proletarian nation', that is, one systematically exploited by the international structure of power and the division of labor, condemned to a situation of inferiority, discriminated against in terms of trade" (62).

(…) of personal belongings, …

Paranoia. Clinical case.

A patient recounted a delusion of more than 30 years' evolution, in which she believed that her husband and his sister had been stealing her personal belongings from shortly after the wedding.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Many items have disappeared from my room: girdles, wool, silk, etc." (49).

(…) of territories…

Querulants. Clinical case.

"Since 1965 the patient had been filing complaints against his neighbors regarding the boundaries of his property. He thought his neighbor had stolen 30 m2from him, but no one would side with him" (3).

(…) or of myths and sacred texts.

Crisis cults. The Melanesian cargo (19th c.).

"Moreover, taking advantage of the apparent similarities between certain biblical accounts and traditional sacred myths, the 'prophet' associated the story of Genesis with the indigenous myth of origins, not without characteristically distorting the former, claiming that white people had changed the names of the divinities in the account of Genesis; by means of such a trick, the Europeans had appropriated the Bible, which in reality belonged to the Fijians" (6).

Another property that may be taken away by the enemy (now called rival) is the partenair, whom the IP tends to regard as his possession. Infidelity does not hurt so much as proof or indication of a lack of love within the couple, but rather because it constitutes a theft of something that is a possession and that, furthermore, is one of the pillars upon which honor rests.

These, then, are the four major forms of harm or damage that the enemy inflicts upon the IGP. But the danger is magnified when we take into account the modus operandi of the enemies.

They conceal themselves

As a rule, the enemy is a being who resists revealing his true identity — that is, showing his face, acting openly.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach test.

"Responses of a complex with schizparanoid overtones.

Contents such as [...] 'from behind...' (63).

And so as not to be identified, the enemies hide.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach Test.

"Responses of a complex with schizparanoid overtones.

Contents such as [...] 'hidden persons'…" (63).

They do so in the most physical and literal sense of the word.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"[...] on one occasion she even went to the extravagance of having a load of firewood tipped over because she believed she would find him hidden underneath" (49).

Lasègue's persecution delusion.

"There too he is pursued by the same individual; he can hear him, but cannot manage to see him" (48).

But they can also hide in anonymity. The paranoid contagion group believes itself to be persecuted by and to be confronting a secret society or a secret conspiracy.

Paranoia.

"[...] of a patient who believed himself to be the target of the observations of a secret society for the promotion of pederasty..." (41).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"For the TFP there exists a 'secret' church, responsible for the Revolution, which it refers to as 'bucha'. In general, any figure of relevance in public life —including the current Pope— is considered a member or person in the service of evil. Any sign of professional success —having an article published in a newspaper— is supposed to be the beginning of complicity..." (69).

Concealing its identity, the enemy attempts to approach its target without arousing suspicion.

Delusion of interpretation.

"He is not so naive as to fail to realize that he is surrounded by camouflaged agents provocateurs, paid by his enemies" (74).

Especially when it goes so far as to use doubles of the loved ones and those close to the IP (Capgras delusion). The enemy may equally be found lurking behind ideologies, movements or social phenomena which it manipulates and which conceal it, rendering its machinations invisible.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"'Catholicism' fought against an infinite number of things: immorality, television, cinema and radio as vehicles of that immorality, the socialist and confiscatory Agrarian Reform, Protestantism, modern art, etc. Instinctively we sensed that in all these things the centuries-long Revolution was present" (12).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"It should be noted, however, that for these revolutionaries, indigenism is barely a pretext, and the poor Indians a mere mass to be maneuvered, which forms part of the neo-proletariat that one seeks to mobilize —alongside prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, punks, and social scum of every kind— in order to demolish the prevailing order of things in the Church and in temporal society, and replace it with anarchic chaos" (12).

Sectarian groups. The Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"[...] a great part of those who confront us do so incited by conservative elements" (42).

An interesting variant of concealment, very frequently repeated in paranoid discourse, is disguise.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach test.

"Responses of a schizo-paranoid complex hue.

Contents such as [...] 'disguised persons' …" (63).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"To advance, the communist revolution must disguise itself as much as possible, it must act behind forces not openly communist, amid social tensions of an apparently non-ideological nature. It must thus attempt to conquer political and cultural positions and obtain structural reforms that cause the West to slide toward socialism, without awakening contrary reactions. The objective is clear: to veil communism in order to lull anti-communism to sleep, leaving the latter without a visible enemy to denounce" (12).

Delusions in which the correct identification of people in one's surroundings is altered are due, in some cases, to underlying neurological lesions, but in others they are nothing more than the reflection of that paranoid bias that leads the PI to the conclusion that the enemy disguises himself with such mastery that he is capable of adopting different identities.

Delusions

"[...] the illusion of Fregoli, in which a persecutor appears presenting himself as different people close to or in contact with the patient. Here the patient imagines similarities" (28).

Closely related to the disguised people that PIs see in the plates are the masks they also perceive.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach Test.

"Responses of a schizo-paranoid nuance complex.

Contents such as [...] 'false faces', 'masks'..." (63).

But they do not only see them in the plates.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"Annex 7

The anti-cults

movement takes off its mask" (8).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"[...] the mask begins to fall from this false ecumenism. The true face of the Revolution appears" (8).

Let us not forget that, from wherever he may be camouflaged or hidden, the enemy sees without being seen and keeps watch.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach Test.

"Responses of a schizo-paranoid complex nuance.

The 'eyes' content..." (63).

It is not for nothing that this is by far the most frequent response in the Rorschach test of IPs.

They Lie

One of the traits that IPs attribute to their enemies is a propensity for lying. They make this clear in multiple-choice tests where they acknowledge that people's selfishness (let us not forget the "tendency to develop negative stereotypes") leads them to lie without hesitation when it comes to defending their own interests. Clinical descriptions provide us with examples of this inability to believe in the truthfulness of others' words.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"A young lawyer [...] considered the telegraphic notification of her death [that of his mother] as a 'childish mystification' and could not be induced to settle the inheritance, given that he was convinced his mother was still alive and only wanted to disown him in order to remarry" (41).

It is in the jealous that this tendency is most manifest; they systematically think of their spouses that they refuse to acknowledge the truth regarding their infidelities or their desire to commit them. The same accusations of lying are leveled by paranoid contagion groups.

Cult groups. The Patriarch.

"Others, subjugated,

also conditioned

by the media

suppliers of corpses and lies

cast upon your sun

the stain of history

banishing shame" (22).

The ease with which the IGP attributes lying to its enemy means that, no matter how friendly a behavior the latter displays, such conduct is not enough to modify the opinions that the IGP has forged about them. They remain the enemy.

Paranoid personality.

"Since the client starts from the premise that all human beings are malicious and deceitful, it becomes easy for them to interpret interactions with other people that appear benign or cooperative as being in reality attempts to deceive them and gain their trust, in order to subject them to attack or exploit them" (5).

Cult groups. TFP.

"Communism finds itself today in a paradoxical situation. At the height of its power —its empire stretches across four continents and its sphere of influence encompasses the entire world— it had to gradually cease threatening and aggressing in order to begin smiling and asking. This new strategy began to manifest itself as far back as the times of Nikita Khrushchev, with his peaceful coexistence of the 1950s. Recently, with Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, communism launched a gigantic diplomatic-propagandistic offensive, to convince the West that Russia now intends to liberalize itself and cease imposing its ideology by force of arms" (12).

Friendly attitudes must never be believed, because the enemy lies and because the enemy does not change, is incorrigible, its wickedness is perennial.

Maoist Leninism.

"When we say that 'imperialism is ferocious', we mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never put aside their butcher's knives nor will they ever become Buddhas, and so until their ruin" (53).

They collude

Paranoid thinking, which is not limited to creating enemies but rather adds certain attributes to them, tends to convince itself that the enemies coordinate and establish common strategies, forming a united front.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"From the conversation at the table he deduces the existence of a conspiracy..." (41).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"It began, he says, when they were following me through the streets; the neighbors got involved and insulted me. There are evidently people who are strangers to me and others whom I know; there must necessarily be a conspiracy" (49).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"As he assumes secret alliances everywhere..." (41).

Paranoia. The master painter N.

"He manifests this delusion during the trial, asserting that the conduct of his superiors and the statements of the prosecution witnesses are due to a plot systematically prepared among all of them" (43).

The secret coalitions imagined by the IGP are varied and, at times, barely plausible.

Serbian nationalism.

"The Serbs are not joking when they explain the entire Balkan crisis and the world's growing incomprehension of their wartime practices as a 'Germano-Vatican conspiracy' seeking to subjugate the Balkans, then Russia, and to do to the Church of pravoslavie (the true faith, Orthodoxy) what the West did to the Warsaw Pact: to hollow it out, to liquidate it" (77).

Or even more so.

Serbian nationalism.

"Objects of universal yet vain and hypocritical condemnation, Milosevic, Karadzic, and Seselj present themselves as scapegoats of a Vatican-Islamist-Germanic plot" (27).

Cult groups. River of Life Ministries.

"After the setback, caused by the death of the diabetic and the loss of most of his followers, Mitchell began to think that a conspiracy had been formed against him, made up of all the evangelical churches, which had hundreds of airplanes and four-wheel-drive vehicles at their disposal. He began to send groups of his followers to hide in the California desert" (24).

Not to mention the even less credible motivations that unite the enemies on that common front.

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"Thus, when El Patriarca had legal troubles in Mallorca, X. A., the organization's representative in Barcelona, declared to the Press: 'The controversy is the result of a campaign orchestrated by drug dealers, healthcare professionals and public health authorities who are envious of the work carried out by El Patriarca'" (71).

Powerful and omnipresent

Paranoid suspicion leads to the conviction that the enemies of the IGP are numerous and powerful, even the most powerful.

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"Did I not know that my father was a member of the Committee of Forty? Admit it! No, I did not know that; I had never in my life heard of the Committee of Forty. Oh, said Cinque, the SLA knew everything about the Committee. It was an ultra-secret group of high-level businessmen, corporate executives and millionaires like Rockfeller who were all part of the CIA, and it was they and the CIA who told the President of the United States what he had to do; they were the ones who truly ran the country" (31).

And if they are not yet that supreme authority, they are on the verge of becoming it.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"Having a clear vision of the panorama described here, they [the TFPs] raise, in 15 nations of the West, the red and gold standard with the rampant lion and the motto Tradition, Family and Property to denounce that communism has not ceased to exist and that, quite on the contrary, although it may seem to be evaporating, it is in the process of consummating the final conquest of the West" (12).

In any case, the conspiracies are broad and manage to reach a planetary dimension.

Maoist Leninism.

"But instead of accepting Peng's request, Mao raised the tone of the accusations, now blaming him for having conspired with the Soviet Union and with all the reactionary forces in the world, including the United States. According to Mao, Peng had tried to lead a counterrevolutionary and anti-communist movement on a worldwide scale" (20).

The magnification of the enemy leads to considering its presence and influence ubiquitous, to truly grotesque extremes.

Sectarian groups. Moonies.

"- This is madness -said my father-. Tell me, whatwould you do if your son, your only son, went to a work workshop to spend a weekend and suddenly disappeared, abandoned school, quit his job, and joined a somewhat dubious organization?

This was the first occasion since I had joined the cult that, for a moment, I allowed myself to think from his point of view. I understood his pain and his anger, and also his paternal love; but I still believed that the communists had brainwashed him" (30).

Communists, incidentally, almost completely nonexistent in the United States of the 70s. The influence of this enemy transformed into an omnipresent giant reaches through the most unsuspected channels.

Sectarian groups. Hermetic Philosophical Institute.

"Computer technology is something very recent and we are unaware of its side effects, only the harmful radiation from monitors having been studied in a primitive way.

Much more difficult will it be to verify its negative effects in a field as unknown as that of hypnosis, the surface of whose true meaning has barely been scratched.

It could even be the case that everything has been coldly calculated and the real purpose behind the existence of the computer is the creation of immense masses of mental slaves, susceptible to being manipulated in the direction desired by those who control the entire system.

Who truly knows the real structure of the software that is on the market?

Who can guarantee that it is free of subliminal messages?" (4).

Honor

Honor m Deep feeling of one's own moral dignity: a man of honor. // Honesty, modesty in a woman. // Good reputation, esteem: to defend someone's honor. // Prestige // [...] (47).

Honor is a good that the individual (or their family clan, or their affiliation group) possesses, and which is endowed with an almost corporeal quality: it can be kept intact, it can be lost and it can also be recovered, it can be tarnished and even cleaned and repaired.

Clinical descriptions reveal that for the IP, honor is an important matter.

Delusion of grievance.

"[...] and all of this with a mouth full of words of probity, of conscience and honor" (74).

The same exaggerated sense of honor characterizes the PCGs.

Nationalism.

"If one were to attribute a personality to the nation as an organism, that personality would be that of the mounted warrior of old: impetuous, belligerent, punctilious in all matters of 'honor' and always ready to wage war" (21).

Nazism.

"2o. The first law and highest dignity for the German man is honor" (Ten laws for the upbringing of children, September 9, 1937, cited in 85).

Honor demands (among other things) that others be required to treat one with deference and respect, and in any case in accordance with the formalities that govern human interactions, formalities which the paranoid individual takes very seriously. Any breach of the rules of formality constitutes a diminishment of honor.

Paranoid personality.

"Frequently, without objective evidence to support it, they feel that they have been deeply and irreversibly offended by another person or persons" (2).

Factor QIV of the 16PF test.

"[...] quick to perceive an offense…" (38).

Victimists.

"[…] other recent studies indicate that victimism, the persistent feeling of being a victim, may be a stable personality trait […] that was associated with a heightened perception of the severity of offenses received…" (10).

The IGP goes even further, for what it demands is privileged treatment where everything is permitted to it without having to reciprocate in any way.

Victimists.

"[…] other recent studies indicate that victimism, the persistent feeling of being a victim, can be a stable personality trait […]the right to behave immorally" (10).

It can take any liberty with the people in its surroundings, yet reacts with indignation at any defensive response (however justified it may be) or at what it perceives as a lack of respect.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"A patient considered the delay in the delivery of a letter by the postman as a serious injury, while he considered the incest with his stepdaughter and the embezzlement of a sum of money to be minor misdeeds" (41).

Sectarian groups. Omkarananda Swami.

"A complaint from some neighbors about disturbing noises was interpreted by the cult as an attack against the guru... First the guru performed magic rituals... The null result led to the attempt to poison a neighbor with cobra venom... and a printer with poisoned chocolates... The cult poisoned the tomatoes, poured hydrofluoric acid into the milk, scattered large quantities of cholera and smallpox bacilli throughout the neighborhood... but failed to kill anyone" (70).

The honor can be conceptually distinguished from suspicion insofar as the PP, when feeling offended, does not necessarily think that the other harbors ill will or hidden hostile intentions; they may simply have treated them poorly out of indifference, carelessness, or ignorance of the formalities. But this does not prevent the PP from feeling offended…

Paranoid personality.

"Tends to feel [...] mistreated..." (83).

Paranoid personality.

"A combative and tenacious sense of one's own rights, regardless of reality" (58).

(…) and reacts with virulence.

Paranoid personality.

"The slightest contempt provokes great hostility" (2).

In addition to instinctive and immediate aggressive reactions, there exist codes of honor that impose revenge as the only means of restoring lost honor. A little further on, in the section on attack, I will discuss the hostile component of honor, which is expressed with terms such as revenge, punishment or reparation. That said, the punctiliousness of the person of honor (and of the PCG) does not always lead to revenge. The contrary reaction of flight is also possible.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Work was never lacking for them, and for ten years, this voluntary union was very happy. D... was resolute in her profession as a trouser-maker; she regularly found work at a large men's clothing shop and led a life of exemplary thrift. One day, she was reprimanded for the delay in delivering her work. Out of spite, she refused to return to the shop, and since she was the only one bringing in income, the two sisters, with no new earnings, gradually exhausted them"(49).

Resentment

The arguments of resentment revolve around the harms and affronts, real or imaginary, suffered in the past, which the IP refuses to forget.

Paranoid personality.

"[...] they can remember grievances for a very long time..." (1).

Victimists.

"[…] other recent works indicate that victimism, the persistent feeling of being a victim, can be a stable personality trait […] resentful…" (10).

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"[...] he/she often presents as a collector of injustices" (79).

Paranoidism in general.

"The paranoid husband or wife becomes a 'collector of injustices' and speculates on the basis of those small slights" (76).

In other cases it is rather a single affront that the patient refuses to overlook.

Delusion of grievance.

"In the delusion of grievance it is a matter of a complaint about a wrong expressly formulated, an initial fact to which the patient returns time and again in his reasoning or in his writings and from which he draws all his deductions" (74).

The resentful attitude manifests itself in various pathologies of the paranoid spectrum.

Factor QIV of the 16PF test.

"[...] resentful" (38).

Erotomania.

"The erotomaniac delusion develops in three stages: stage of hope, stage of spite, stage of resentment" (11).

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"Hence, often, the patient dominated by this relational organization may present himself as the typical resentful person" (79).

IPs do not limit themselves to dwelling on their memories; rather, these memories are laden with a resentment that easily transforms into vengeful action.

Paranoid personality.

"[...] they never forgive slights, insults, or injuries" (1).

PCGs are also resentful.

Nationalism.

"A victim by vocation, by trade, the nationalist frenetically collects grievances, in the manner of those resentful spouses who keep a secret ledger of petty humiliations, and tends to sum them all up in a great original grievance that preferably occurred in a distant past and that provides such a convenient explanation and such a perfect alibi for any misfortune of the present that they exempt those who adopt them from any need for reflection or action: the left, in South America, dedicates itself to preventing by all means the arrival of Columbus and Hernán Cortés in the New World, and almost two centuries after the independence of those republics continues to attribute to Spain the origin of all ills; the Serbs rape, murder, and burn because in the fourteenth century they lost the Battle of Kosovo; the ETA patriots valiantly continue the struggle of the Carlist priests; the Andalusian converts to Islam demonstrate against the taking of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs, and so on" (57).

An interesting manifestation of resentment is the drawing up of lists of offenses and offenders, jealously kept until the day of revenge.

Nazism.

"More than once I have been overcome with rage thinking about the state of moral dissolution that presided over the installation on our territory of that whole apparatus of denunciation and betrayal, which allowed it to prosper in such a scandalous manner. I remember a case in which a deputy, in a public session of the Reichstag, was asking the government whether it was aware that, on such-and-such a road, four combat tanks had been seen passing through that manifestly did not correspond to the stipulations of the diktat of Versailles... and what the government intended to do about it! At that time, I could not, unfortunately, do anything other than note down in some lists, carefully kept up to date, the names of the traitors, so that those swine would not escape the punishment they deserved on the day when National Socialism came to power" (32).

The real enemy

Summarizing the last three sections, it can be stated that in suspicion, honor, and resentment lie the motivations for hostile behavior, at least the explicit ones. But there is also the possibility of unmotivated enmity.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I feel hatred toward people and I don't know why.

Which leads us to ask whether what the IGP takes as motivations could not be mere after-the-fact justifications with which to make sense of and render morally permissible the hostile behavior, toward which it would tend in a far more primary and spontaneous way.

Querulants.

"Kahn (1928) described several of the characteristics that he believed important in these personalities. He thought that 'they need the pleasure of struggle'..." (72).

If suspicion, honor, and resentment make it possible to create nonexistent enemies, it may also happen that the IGP does not need such invention insofar as it has real enemies at its disposal. Such is the case of numerous querulant patients who bring before the courts injustices and grievances that they have genuinely suffered.

Persecuted-persecutors.

"It is almost always following a real event, occurring in their existence, that the delusion takes shape…" (66).

The violence of a large part of the crisis cults was directed against the Western colonizers who, to a considerable extent and in most cases, could be regarded as true enemies.

Crisis cults. The Baniwa Venancio (19th century).

"The region of Içana was fertile in the appearance of characters of the same type. Most of them preached, it seems, a new Christian doctrine, mixed with certain practices of the Jurupari religion, and all seemed to encourage the Indians to revolt against the invader..." (73).

In any case, the "real enemy" should not be taken merely as a pretext or a rationalization for the display of paranoid behavior. "Real" threats and aggressions (from an external enemy, from the decomposition of one's own social group, from natural catastrophes, etc.) are elements that, in themselves, favor the paranoidization of human groups or the proliferation of messianic movements.

Cameron (7) transformed this cause-and-effect relationship into a circular causality in the interaction between the paranoid individual and their environment.

The paranoid "pseudocommunity" would form when the people in the PI's environment feel uncomfortable in their presence, and even frightened, which would lead them to whisper among themselves about the patient and even to turn against them. In this way, and to a certain extent, the enemy who had initially been nothing more than a product of the PI's imagination would end up acquiring an appearance of reality.

Paranoid personality.

"Their combative and suspicious nature can provoke a hostile response in others, which, in turn, serves to confirm the subject's initial expectations" (2).

Reformers

"It is strange that men like Torquemada, Calvin, or Robespierre, who felt a superhuman inspiration, did not trust exclusively to Providence the task of defending them, and yet were accessible to fear. Feeling the hatred they had amassed around them, they sometimes experienced the anguish of being assassinated while at the same time protesting their desire to die as martyrs in service of the holy cause" (17).

Persecutors-persecuted of Falret.

"[...] Increasingly defiant and aggressive, they soon find themselves exposed to malevolence and defend themselves preemptively by attacking. It is in this that they are at once the persecuted and the persecutors" (25).

The appearance of a "pseudocommunity paranoid" as a reaction to the unfriendly attitudes of the paranoid contagion group, is not a strictly individual phenomenon of exclusively clinical interest. The violent attitudes of numerous paranoid contagion groups generate a rejection that means their perception of a certain hostility from their surroundings is not a mere fantasy…

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"Regarding the unusual police investigation carried out at a TFP headquarters in São Paulo..." (12).

(…) but rather a reality provoked by themselves. As for nations, their own belligerence means they easily turn other equally belligerent nations into enemies.

It must be noted that the "pseudocommunity paranoid" is not formed solely as a consequence of the hostility of the IGP. The persistent and exhausting proselytism of Sokagakkai, together with other characteristics such as militarism, widely rejected by Japanese society, have also contributed to fostering social rejection toward that Buddhist group. Intensive proselytism and the absolute prohibition of blood transfusions (with the child mortality it entails) has produced the same effect, in the Western world, with respect to the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Scrutiny

Paranoid personality. Millon (2004).

"They never let their guard down, they carefully search for any sign of imminent assault from the depths of their fortresses. Nothing must escape their scrutiny" (54).

Living subjected to a permanent threat, it is understandable that the paranoid contagion group makes an intense effort to remain vigilant: it needs to get ahead and be able to know when and how the attack will come.

Paranoid personality. Millon (2004).

"[…] paranoid subjects feel the need to control those around them. They must know the whereabouts of everyone at all times, and know what they are working on and why […] When everything is known, there is nothing to fear" (54).

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"Often, at least when the paranoid organization and good cognitive capacities coincide, the epistemophilic motivations or drives epistemofílicas are highly developed. But not in the service of creativity, of the search for or confirmation of the aesthetic impact, the beauty and inner worth of the other, but rather in the service of vigilance…" (79).

Maoist Leninism.

"Victory must in no way cause us to relax our vigilance in the face of the frantic machinations of the imperialists and their lackeys, who seek to take revenge. Whoever relaxes their vigilance will be left disarmed politically and will find themselves reduced to a passive position" (53).

New Acropolis

"Everything outside is a threat to the ideal and one must remain alert, at every moment one must be on guard..." (65).

It is essential to pay close attention to small details, given that the enemy does not show its face and the only thing that can be obtained are subtle signs of its proximity, to which one must be very attentive.

Paranoia.

"[...] in the clinical picture of paranoia. Among the objective characteristics are included [...] attention to small details..." (52).

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"He instructed me on how to discern shadows as well as bodies, how to observe and remember the details of each car that passed along the street below" (31).

Once the signs have been gathered, it is essential not to forget them

Jealous

"The jealous man keeps in memory with full detail certain events, banal for the protagonist of those same events…" (9).

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"[...] the creation of information files on others to be used defensively (in fantasy or in reality)" (79).

Totalitarian societies keep a jealous watch over themselves, in search of hidden traitors.

Maoist Leninism.

"In the city, perfecting a traditional system of mutual control (the baojia) created by the Kuomintang, residents' groups (of 15 to 20 households) are subordinated to inhabitants' committees, which are in turn subordinated to street or neighborhood committees. Nothing must escape them: any nocturnal visit or stay of a day or more by a 'stranger' must be the subject of an entry in the residents' committee" (14).

The jealous, for their part, seek out female traitors.

Jealous.

"A distrustful love relationship (any other kind as well, though it matters less), that is to say, one of minimal trust, is tainted from the outset because it must center on the reduction of suspicion through surveillance…" (9).

And they apply the greatest of efforts to unmasking them.

The jealous.

"Life for the delusionally jealous is an endless task. My first patient would return home at every work break, paying particular attention to the line of coats in the entrance hall. Any change in their order meant a visit from the lover" (23).

Domestic tyranny.

"[jealousy] in some aggressors comes to constitute an 'obsessive quality,' permanently monitoring their partner's every move. The surveillance intensifies once the wives decide to leave them, move out of the home, or try to end the relationship with them. This behavior can go as far as following her everywhere she goes, interrogating her children, listening in on phone calls to monitor her activities and who she associates with, and so on" (13).

It is important to prevent enemy agents from infiltrating among new recruits and, if it is not possible to individually investigate each of their pasts, other defensive strategies may be employed that reveal the same hypervigilant attitude.

Sectarian groups. Scientology.

"I personally —states Oscar C.— was offered a labor contract for a period of five years. Among the clauses were: 1) Not having belonged to, or having any family member who belongs to, the Armed Forces or intelligence agencies. 2) Not having any family member who is an enemy of Scientology. 3) Not having previously worked at any other Narconon or in the Sea Organization [the cult's militarized branch]. 4) Not seeking new stories [a report] or spying within Scientology. I was not given any copy of the contract..." (71).

With regard to hypochondriacs (PI and adherents of those paranoid contagion groups that foster fear of illness), these individuals preferentially direct their attention to the minor discomforts or sensations they notice in their own bodies, likewise demanding all manner of additional examinations.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I want them to run some tests on me because I'm afraid this will lead me to my death.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I went to my primary care physician to request a toxicological analysis.

They also impose upon themselves the study of the feared diseases, hoping to gain enough knowledge to diagnose them early, by and for themselves.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I have read everything about the derivatives of trichloro.

In short, if one must be vigilant at all times, it is not only to locate the enemy early, but one must also be ready to react swiftly, by attacking...

Sectarian-Leninist splinter group. SLA.

"They slept fully dressed, completely armed, ready to wake up for combat" (31).

Sectarian-Leninist splinter group. SLA.

"Every five days there was a combat drill to prepare for the expected arrival of the FBI" (31).

[...] or fleeing.

Sectarian groups. The Sullivanians.

"We monitored the nuclear power plants in the area, we constantly listened to the news in order to flee in case of emergency, and we kept a fleet of buses ready for a possible evacuation" (80).

Anger-hatred

The affective component of hostile behavior seems to be dominated by two emotions: hatred and fear.

Paranoia.

"Three patients showed evidence of fear only and three had anger only. The others had fear and anger, although patients more frequently described fears, while informants described outbursts of rage" (39).

Numerous descriptions and case presentations remind us of the presence of the first of these in the PI.

Delusion of grievance. Aub case.

"In the asylum he is calm, occupied in drafting pamphletsagainst Bismarck, to whom he currently devotes his hatred..." (74).

Paranoia. The Count of Montlosier.

"It was not Jansenism that had kindled in the soul of Pascal's compatriotthe hatred of the Jesuits,but rather Gallicanism" (46).

Persecuted-persecutors.

"His hatredand ideas of revenge against his enemies" (66).

The jealous.

"Several researchers have gathered data on the affective states associated with jealousy using structured interviews and questionnaires, and an experience commonly described is that of the so-called 'jealousy flash' in which a sudden, brief but intense autonomic arousal takes place associated with the perceived threat of infidelity" (23).

The "jealousy flash" runs its course with an intense aggressiveness that transforms the jealous person into a dangerous being who can equally turn against the woman who is supposedly deceiving him as against the unfortunate rival.

The hatred of the IPP can emerge as a reaction to the perception of being harmed or harassed.

Paranoia. The master painter N.

"Little by little, N. becomes distrustful, feels discredited at the slightest reason and begins to perceive with redoubled intensity the discourtesies of others, ending up hating them intensely and fanatically" (43).

But hatred must not always be considered a secondary phenomenon derived from other more nuclear elements. This is what Morel thought.

Delusion of grievance.

"This is no longer a simple passionate state, nor a legitimate claim of unjustly injured rights, but on the contrary a 'morbid hatred' (Morel)..." (74).

As regards paranoia, hatred does not always derive from nor is it necessarily connected with delusional ideas.

Paranoia.

"Although in all cases the affect was altered along with the delusions, the offense was not directly related to the delusions in three patients who had not incorporated the victim into their delusions. Careful examination of the mental state at the time of the assaults did not suggest that the victims had been even briefly incorporated into the delusional systems of the patients. In each of these cases, the affect at the time of the offense was clearly related to the prior mood disturbance, suggesting that the mood disturbance (fear, anger, or both) was generalized and extended beyond the content of the delusions" (39).

In the paranoid contagion group we also encounter hatred, as a characteristic feeling among fanatical militants.

Sectarian groups. Shiloh.

"Stanford wrote, 'in fact you must hate, WITH A PERFECT HATRED, your father, mother, brother, sister, children, and even your own life, insofar as they are not in conformity with the word of God'" (24).

Maoist Leninism.

"The camp was organized in military fashion. It was administered by Army officers, and was subject to the control of the Revolutionary Committee of Chengdu. At first, my mother was treated as a class enemy and forced to remain standing during meals with her head bowed. That form of punishment, called 'field denunciation,' was recommended by the media as a good way of reminding the others, who were allowed to rest, that they should always save some energy for hatred" (37).

Sometimes, what is most striking is not hatred but quite the opposite: an overflowing love for the other members of the paranoid contagion group, as was evident, for example, in the wave of exultant patriotism that preceded World War I.

Nationalism.

"[In World War I the masses…] They found themselves in hell, there is no doubt, but that was not what they were looking for; more than that desire to kill, wound, or torture their fellow human beings that Freud attributed to them, they felt something much more akin to love" (Stromberg, Roland. Redemption by war: The Intellectual and 1914. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press; 1982. Cited in 21).

And the fact is that, as a sincere sectarian leader was able to aptly verify in himself, love and hate coexist and by no means exclude one another.

Sectarian groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"On other matters he was very explicit. For example, it became quite clear that he considered anyone who criticized or abandoned the Temple to be part of a conspiracy aimed at destroying him and his movement. 'Threat, threat, threat of extinction,' he thundered. 'Sometimes I wish I had never been born. I know hatred. Love and hate are very closely bound together. I can fall prey to both of those feelings'" (42).

Fear

Pre-fascist nationalism.

"The same social strata formed the core of that sub-variety of nationalism, the movements of political antisemitism that appeared in the last two decades of the century, notably in Germany (Stöcker), Austria (Schönerer, Lueger), and France (Drumont, the Dreyfus case) [...] The key word in the vocabulary of the French Right in the 1880s was not 'family', 'tradition', 'religion', 'morality' or any similar term. It was, according to analysts, 'threat" (33).

The IP, as is well known, tends to see threats everywhere.

Nazism

"... Hitler, for example, suffered for years from cancerophobia, fearing he had stomach cancer. As he had intestinal problems, none of his doctors could convince him that his fears had no basis. He also feared being poisoned, being murdered, losing his health, losing weight, being betrayed, lacking mystical abilities, anesthesia, death, and being unable to fulfill his earthly mission" (81).

And the perception of a threat produces fear. A fear that clinical descriptions portray for us.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

- An anxiety as if they were going to abduct me...

Lasègue's persecution delusion. Clinical case.

"[...] I have spent many sleepless nights, believing my life was in danger" (48).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I continue to be afraid of the effects of the toxic substance.

This is a fantasized threat but one that the IGP perceives as enormous, which terrifies him.

Sectarian groups. Moonies.

"They had told me terrible stories about deprogramming. I came to believe that group members were kidnapped, beaten and tortured by the deprogrammers: Satan's elite soldiers dedicated to physically destroying people so that they would lose their faith in God" (30).

Sokagakkai.

"Today, the people of Japan tremble with fear before the future, as if standing before a hurricane. The inhabitants of the East and of the planet are adrift in search of salvation, like sheep on the edge of the abyss that leads to hell or to perdition" (34).

Fear is intimately linked to the need to move away (to flee) or to, at least, avoid the source of danger.

Lasègue's persecution delusion. Clinical case.

"Despite all insistence, M... refuses to continue in his employment; he reaches the door of the administration office, led by his wife, but does not dare cross the threshold for fear of being insulted or detained as a thief" (48).

In the pages that follow, flight will be discussed in greater detail as a characteristic behavior of paranoiacs and, on some occasions, of paranoid contagion groups. But it must also be emphasized that fear, among the adherents, ends up generating greater adhesion and submission to the group, the only safe refuge.

The Way International

"Like many other Bible-inspired groups, The Way emphasizes the power of the devil in everyday affairs, thereby instilling great fears in its members so that they obey the leaders without raising objections" (30).

Flight

Lasègue's persecution delusion. Clinical case.

"[...] and they explain that they had hastened to flee, that they had taken refuge in an avenue, that they had hidden at a merchant's house..." (48).

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"Its dynamics (group) mental is dominated by the basic assumption of fight-flight" (79).

The aim of paranoid flight —individual or collective— is to put an end to the harassment of external enemies by putting distance between them.

Paranoia. Aimée case.

"The reports provide the following information. Admission certificate from Dr. Chatelin: 'Mental problems of more than one year's evolution; the people she passes on the street direct crude insults at her, accuse her of extraordinary vices, even those who do not know her; the people around her say the worst possible things about her, and the entire town of Melun is aware of her conduct, which is considered depraved; she has also wanted to leave the town, even without money, to go wherever it may be" (45).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"On the fifth day they abandoned the house in a state of great excitement, wandering frantically and traveling for the following 36 hours, encountering everywhere the spirits of demons and Jews, until the police were informed of their deviant behavior" (60).

Cult groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"And so he convinced the people of color in the Temple that, if they did not follow him to Guyana, they would end up in concentration camps, where they would be exterminated. As for the white members, he led them to believe that their names were inscribed on a secret list of enemies of the State, held by the CIA, and that they would be persecuted, tortured, and imprisoned before dying if they did not accompany him to the former colony" (42).

Let us not forget that human beings are not the only enemy or danger threatening the IGP. There exist hypochondriac flights with which it attempts to escape from illnesses and the agents that cause them.

Cult groups. Otto Muehl's commune.

"On the estate of Friedrichshorf, 40 kilometers from La Gomera and 4,000 from Vienna, Muehl and his governing board will continue spending their summers. In 15 years they have managed to build there a remarkable village, with spacious and modern communal dwellings, large gardens, a museum of contemporary art, an artificial lake, their own medical facilities, and a spectacular infrastructure...

An advance party of this organization of 400 foreigners lands in the spring of 1987 'fleeing from the radioactive cloud of the Chernobyl disaster'. It purchases two estates of no less than 320 and 314 hectares, several plots of land in the island capital, San Sebastián, and an apartment as a central office" (78).

IGPs also flee from great catastrophes, whether natural or man-made, to safe refuges.

Cult groups. The Reverend Jones's Peoples Temple.

"Back in the United States, after two years of evangelizing abroad, Jones fell prey to one of his apocalyptic obsessions: the threat of nuclear holocaust. An article published in 1966 in the Esquire Magazine convinced him that one of the safest areas in the world against a nuclear attack and the ensuing radioactive contamination was the Redwood Valley, in northern California, and, pure coincidence!, the dense jungle of Belo Horizonte, in Brazil" (42).

Cult groups. The Reverend Jones's Peoples Temple.

"Citing an article from Esquire magazine, Jones claims that Northern California will be spared from the bomb blasts and destruction of nuclear war. He relocates, with one hundred and fifty of his followers, to Ukiah, California..." (42).

Crisis cults. Lauliwasikaw (19th century).

"The doctrine of the Shawnee prophet underwent some variations as it spread to other tribes. The Cherokee were informed by the Creek, around 1812, that a terrible wind was going to rise, accompanied by hail as large as corn mortars, which would kill whites and unbelievers alike. Those who wished to be saved had to flee to the Great Smoky Mountains. Persuaded of the truth of the news, numerous Cherokee from Alabama and Georgia abandoned their beehives, their orchards, their slaves, and everything they had acquired from the whites, and, despite the arguments and warnings of those who remained unbelieving, a great number of them undertook the arduous march that was to lead them to the mountains of North Carolina, where the great majority of the Cherokee still live today" (44).

Some IP live in a permanent state of flight and lead a wandering existence. Descriptions of this type of patient abound in the literature (the clinical psychiatrist may occasionally encounter them in emergency services, where they sometimes come to be examined, believing they have been poisoned).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"[...] never stays long in any one place, withdraws..." (41).

Persecuted-persecutors. Pottier (1886).

"[...] agitated, irregular, vagabond existence…" (66).

Lasègue's delusion of persecution.

"The alienated are seen, thus persecuted, fleeing from house to house..." (48).

Folie à deux. Case of the monozygotic twins.

"In 1967 the twins began to live a wandering existence traveling through the state. When they were stopped by the police they had all their possessions in the car and told identical stories about persecution by members of their family" (75).

Other less severe IP cases are distinguished by a more modest propensity for changes of address and employment, a reflection of that same tendency to flee from an environment that always ends up being hostile. In some psychometric tests, they acknowledge feeling uncomfortable "indoors."

Paranoia.

"To avoid persecution and constant questioning, the patient abruptly changes jobs under hollow pretexts or goes off on a journey" (41).

Lasègue's persecution delusion.

"[...] I have changed my address. In my new lodgings I have once again been persecuted, I do not know very well by whom..." (48).

Reformers.

"[...] professional instability, migratory tendencies…" (17).

Reformers. Enfantin.

"An immediate disciple of Saint-Simon, Enfantin, was born on February 8, 1796, and demonstrated at the beginning of his life very diverse aptitudes that manifested as quite notable social instability.

He was successively a student at the École Polytechnique, an employee of a wine merchant, a traveling salesman in Holland and Russia, and in Saint Petersburg he worked at a banking house. Back in France, he was cashier at the Mortgage Bank; then he returned to wine brokerage, and then, in 1825, after having been affiliated with a certain number of secret societies of the Restoration, he became enthused with the work of Saint Simon.

[After a period in which he became the charismatic leader of the Saint-Simonian community…] Nevertheless, his congenital instability resurfaced and he became successively a farmer, an agent for colonial expansion societies in Algeria and Egypt, a postmaster in the Drôme, a railway director" (17).

The following clinical account, relating to the assassin of the twentieth President of the United States, James A. Garfield, is a fine example of that lifestyle characterized by continual changes of residence.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"Charles Julius Guiteau was born on September 8, 1841. His paternal grandfather was a highly regarded physician [of Huguenot origins] and held deeply exalted religious opinions.

His father was an intelligent and energetic man, exceptionally gifted for business; but he was a religious fanatic and devoted the last thirty years of his life to preaching free love and socialism; he died at the age of seventy, after several years of illness accompanied by emaciation and delirium. Some family members and people familiar with his ideas considered him at least partially deranged, but according to the more general opinion he simply passed for an eccentric. Eighteen years ago, he had occasion to bring a patient to the central hospital for the insane in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he remained for several days. He claimed to have a personal and direct relationship with the Divinity; he wished to attempt the cure of the insane through the simple laying on of hands; on the basis of this and of his overall conduct, Doctor Mac Ferland, the director of the asylum, considered him, at that time, to be deranged.

A paternal uncle of the assassin died deranged in an asylum; another, a drinker, ended up in dementia; one of his paternal aunts married a madman; she had a deranged daughter who died while still an infant. Another paternal aunt also had a deranged son who was admitted to an asylum; she herself appears to have shown some signs of madness.

At the time of his birth, Guiteau's mother had been suffering for several months from a cerebral condition for which her skull had been shaved; she had two more children who died at two years of age, one, and at twenty months, the other.

Guiteau's only sister, after giving testimony before the court, had a petit mal attack; her physician noted that she was predisposed and had previously suffered from puerperal mania. Guiteau's only brother, when he testified before the court, made a fanatical declaration about the antagonism between Satan and Jesus Christ and about the perpetual intervention of these two opposing influences in all the constituent facts of human existence. He concluded by saying: 'These were the theological opinions of my father, they are those of my brother, they are mine.' Guiteau's only half-sister, around twenty-six years of age, suffers from exophthalmic goiter. There is no information on the health of his only half-brother, around twenty-three years of age.

In his childhood, Guiteau was slow to speak; there were significant instances of neglect in his upbringing, given that his father had given himself over to the religious eccentricities of the free love community in Oneida. On the upper and posterior part of the frontal bone he received a significant blow that left him a scar. He felt little inclination toward manual labor, but he enjoyed books. It was from the age of eighteen that he gave himself over to religious fanaticism; he had solitary habits and around that time contracted a venereal disease. At nineteen years of age, undoubtedly as a consequence of his taste for libertinism and of that sexual depravity so frequent in the congenital forms of degeneration, he also joined the free love community. He displayed extreme irritability and went through periods of melancholic decline followed by exaltation. He believed himself to be inspired. Vain and obstinate, he eventually left the community after five years, feeling that he was not appreciated at his true worth. He then wished to found a newspaper titled the Theocratic Press, to suppress the churches and guarantee the religious education of the United States in its entirety. 'I have gone to New York —he wrote to his father— to obey what I consider a divine inspiration… I am convinced that the destiny of the Theocratic Press is, in time and in large part, to replace worship in the churches.'

His attempt barely got off the ground. He returned to Oneida, from which he clandestinely escaped after a year, denouncing the abuses of free love, and threatening to bring a civil lawsuit against the community.

From 1866 until 1871 he led a life of adventure. He established himself in Chicago as a businessman, disregarding the law and at times misappropriating the sums he received on behalf of his clients. In 1869 he married a respectable woman whom he abandoned four years later to live with a prostitute.

After an unsuccessful trip to San Francisco, he re-established himself in New York as a businessman. He had no more success than before and turned to politics hoping to obtain a position; he dreamed of claiming one hundred thousand dollars in damages from the New York Herald for defamation and ended up going to prison for breach of trust.

In 1873 he invented a new type of advertising, and was so confident of its success that he offered the presidency of the United States or the governorship of Illinois to anyone who wished to purchase his discovery.

In July 1875 he had taken refuge at his sister's home in the countryside. One day when he was chopping wood, he raised the axe over his sister as she passed by him. The family doctor, called to see him, declared that he was mad. He disappeared suddenly, taking with him the Bible he had been constantly reading.

In 1876 he was once again in Chicago. Stirred by the preachings of Moody and Sankey, he believed himself called to play the role of a great evangelist. He received nothing but contempt and ridicule.

In 1879 he published his sermons under the title The Truth Companion to the Bible. He did not pay the publisher and was unable to sell his book.

In 1880, he was vegetating in Boston, accumulating debts and refusing to pay them on the grounds that he was the servant of God and that Jesus Christ was not in the habit of paying bills, which did not prevent him from displaying the cunning of a skilled rogue. He finally turned to politics. It appears that he believed he had played a great role in Garfield's victory and wrote to him to offer his congratulations. Shortly thereafter he wrote to the Secretary of State, Evarts, asking him for some important assignment. He then sent letter after letter to the President to remind him of his alleged services, demanding now a posting in Austria, now the consulate in Paris. He became a veritable stalker; his approaches were so frequent and indiscreet that it became necessary to bar him from entering the White House.

Finding himself ignored despite all his displays of selflessness and loyalty, Guiteau conceived for the first time the idea of putting an end to the President six weeks before the assassination. This thought crossed his mind one night when he had gone to bed exhausted. He claims that this idea initially filled him with indignation and that he begged God to deliver him from it, or to let him know whether it was a suggestion of the devil or a divine inspiration. He claims that on the first of June he knew with certainty that it was a divine inspiration, an assertion he had already made use of in connection with insignificant acts of his everyday life.

On June 8th he borrowed fifteen dollars and bought the largest caliber pistol…

[...] He stated that his crime was motivated neither by revenge nor by self-interest. 'During two weeks of earnest prayers, I became convinced that the Divinity had entrusted me with this task and that I should prepare myself for it. It happened on the first of June; since that date I have not had the slightest doubt about the divine nature of the act and the necessity of carrying it out" (15).

More briefly:

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- The neighbors watch me and learn my schedule. Every two or three years I need to change my address.

With regard to paranoid contagion groups, mass migrations —all group members together— have been a characteristic behavior of messianic movements throughout the centuries. Modern means of transport and communication mean that the image of a compact mass of people heading to an unknown destination no longer occurs among today's cults. But, in any case, both ancient and modern paranoid individuals and paranoid contagion groups share the same tendency to flee to remote, isolated, or faraway places.

Folie à famille. Clinical case.

"He moved the family repeatedly, suspecting the people in each place. They often lived in remote and isolated locations" (26).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"They decide to leave Paris to emigrate abroad; they pack and unpack their trunks..." (49).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I noticed that they were singing songs alluding to me. I got nervous and went to the village. I had not planned to go, but I feel fine now.

Zionism was a movement that sought nothing less than to create a Jewish National State in which the members of the chosen people could enjoy the illusion of constituting a nation in the modern sense of the word and escape definitively from persecution. To that end, Jews from the most distant corners of the Western world relocated to Palestine. Since the time of the Diaspora, there had never been any collective return of such dimensions. Paradoxically, it was necessary to wait for the emergence of a nationalist impulse — an essentially secular ideology — among the followers of the Jewish faith for them to mobilize en masse, fleeing rejection and persecution.

Zionist nationalism.

"Modern Zionism, which found in the historical claim to the biblical land of Zion the definitive solution to the ills afflicting God's chosen people, originated from the initiative of the Viennese Jew Theodor Herzl, who, after observing in Paris the campaign orchestrated around the Dreyfus affair, published in 1896 The Jewish State and a year later convened a conference of Jews from across Europe in Basel, where the program 'to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine, secured by public law' was born. The proposal of Herzl, coinciding with the will expressed by numerous Russian Jews, served to rapidly crystallize the Zionist movement. In 1901, Chaim Weizmann, anticipating the aims of Herzl, created a Jewish National Fund with the purpose of purchasing land in Palestine and thereby initiating a progressive colonization of the territory, which at that time formed part of the Ottoman Empire" (59).

In the face of enemy harassment, other forms of flight are also possible that do not entail the need to travel great distances.

Maoist Leninism.

"According to Lin Ke, precisely after the November session, Mao took to his bed and stayed there for months, as he often did when he found himself in the midst of a political struggle, getting up only to go to the bathroom or to deliver the occasional speech. The chairman used the supposed state of weakness of these depressive episodes to prepare his political strategy" (20).

Maoist Leninism.

"As soon as Mao decided to launch his counterattack, his health improved rapidly; the cold disappeared and he recovered his former vigor and his former spirit" (20).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"One day, it was November 1875, Joséphine announced the arrival of the gendarmes; faced with this extreme event, only one recourse remained to them: death. They turned off the lights and both slipped under the mattresses, in a childlike vision of suicide, to suffocate themselves; the first sensation of choking was so distressing that they lost heart in their attempt" (49).

Attack

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"Its dynamics (group) mental life is dominated by the basic assumption of fight-flight" (79).

Querulants.

"The premorbid traits of litigious-querulant delusional disorder include [...] hostility" (52).

Folie à famille. The Iranian family.

"[...] they believed that the persecutors had used governmental power to cut off their water and electricity supply, which caused them significant problems. Therefore, they did not pay their bills, in order to fight against the government and force it to resign" (55).

The ultimate manifestation of hostile behavior is aggression, physical, verbal, and of every kind.

Domestic tyranny.

"[...] there occur frequent aggressions against the woman's family members and, above all, against the people with whom she attempts to begin a new relationship" (51).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"[...] writes insulting letters to strangers, occasionally provokes scenes with his friends and relatives that those people do not understand in the least" (41).

Persecuted-persecutors. Cullerre.

"Under the pretext of being persecuted, he becomes the worst of harassers. Once the victim has been chosen, he pursues her with a blind and irresistible tenacity. Nothing stops him; his idea leads him and he follows it imperturbably, without remorse, without scruples, without concern for the possible consequences, pleased with himself, with his great faculties, with his superior education, with his distinguished manners. He spends his days in the corridors of the ministries, the courts, the police prefecture, accosting prominent figures and lavishing upon the representatives of authority the abundant torrent of his accusatory prose" (15).

These are aggressions clearly disproportionate to the motives, imagined or real, that provoke them…

Paranoid personality.

"He tends to express an intense and inappropriate anger, disproportionate to the situation" (83).

Querulants. Clinical case.

"In 1932 he was declared the father of a child born out of wedlock. The patient maintained that the father was a married neighbor. He wrote him threatening letters and shot at him with a pistol three times from his window" (3).

(…) and which may constitute the first symptom of the disease.

Paranoia. The Aimée Case.

"An alarmed entourage notices multiple reactions. One day, he slashes the tires of a colleague's bicycle with a knife. One night he gets up to hurl a water jug at his wife's head; another time, it is a file that serves as the projectile" (45).

The aggressiveness of the paranoid contagion group tends to appear linked to other aspects of paranoid behavior and especially to hostile behavior. Thus, suspicion, the fear of an imminent attack or harm, gives the aggression a preventive character. The enemy must be disarmed before he can use his weapons.

Maoist Leninism.

"The new Government decided not to appear pusillanimous. As was stated in an official document: 'If we do not kill them, they will be the ones who come back and kill us'" (37).

However, the forcefulness of the response bears no relation to the supposed danger.

Sectarian groups. Scientology.

"The opponent of the cult becomes 'fair game' and, as such, can and must be investigated in every facet of his life; his property can be stolen, his signature forged on compromising documents, traps set for him to ruin him professionally or have him imprisoned, he can be extorted, pursued to the point of causing him serious psychological problems..." (71).

Sectarian groups. Scientology.

"Without any sense of shame, advertisements such as this one are published in the cult's magazines:

"NOTICE. A reward of $400,000 will be paid to any member of staff, or person who is not, who heard of or was subjected to any provocative activity contrary to the organization, and who then provides sufficient evidence of the criminal background and connections of the provocateur, in such a way that he may be handed over to the Police by the Religious Technology Center [the entity that holds power above the Church of Scientology itself]. HCOPL 1 Sept. 1969R" (71).

The aggressiveness of the IGP is also tied to honor, that strange and ethereal object that is difficult to define, yet no less deadly for it.

"Honor is not something concrete or even constant, but neither is it merely 'air' as Falstaff thought, since it has caused more deaths than the plague" (64).

Persecuted-persecutors.

"They believe they have been victims of an injustice, of an insult, of some harm or other, and from that moment they feel an overwhelming need to obtain reparation, to compel a retraction, to satisfy a desire for revenge or, better yet, to rid themselves of their persecutors" (66).

Even in our own day, and as certain sociological studies have revealed, the bulk of deaths from clashes between street gangs in North America (a country with a high rate of deaths by homicide) is attributed to matters of honor and territorial possession, and not to disputes over control of drug distribution or other more tangible interests.

The IP is hypersensitive to any form of offense and, like any person of honor, is prone to violent and vengeful reactions.

Paranoid personality.

"[...] every disdain or mistreatment seems [...] deserving of punishment" (5)

Victimists.

"[…] other recent studies indicate that victimism, the persistent feeling of being a victim, can be a stable personality trait […] revanchists…" (10).

PCGs practice that same type of violence linked to matters of honor. The offense demands revenge, but not by seeking one's own defense (as in the preemptive strike of the suspicious person) but rather the reparation of the harm suffered.

Nazism

"Offended honor can only be repaired with blood. Your honor is the fidelity toward your people and toward yourself" (Ten Laws for the Education of Children, September 9, 1937, cited in 85).

Nazism

"During the next fifty years, the destiny of France will consist of repairing the mistake of Versailles" (32).

A punishment that must be public and well-known if what is truly intended is to staunch the wound to honor.

Domestic tyranny

"Despite this attempt to relegate aggression to the private sphere of the home and to keep it hidden, it turns out that the man does not care about the screams, the voices, or the noises that pass through walls and windows, nor about carrying out his aggressions, especially the most serious ones, in public places, as we frequently see in the media: women murdered in the street on their way out of work, at a bus station, in a park while their child was playing, on the way back from shopping… The aggressor does not seek the cover of darkness or secluded locations, he does not flee afterward, but rather commits the aggression and turns himself in to the Police or the Civil Guard, because it must be made absolutely clear that he was the one who carried out the aggression"51).

The violent reactions of the IP to offenses occur in an immediate and reflexive manner…

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- If someone does something to me in the car I go blind with rage.

(…) but also adhering to strict codes of conduct that explicitly impose a violent response.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"Affronts must always be answered, by violence if necessary. After all, combativeness is a great Catholic virtue.

If you are slapped for being Luis, you should turn the other cheek. But if you are slapped for being virtuous or for being Catholic, you must respond with another slap" (69).

J.O.N.S.

"Let no blasphemy against the Fatherland ever again go without the just reply of an authentic Spaniard! This, comrades, is what our Party must achieve — the only one, as you know, that in a revolutionary and violent manner is born ready to achieve, at whatever cost, the greatness and dignity of Spain"(50).

The events that must be avenged may lie very far back in time, but paranoid rancor transforms them into something close, almost present. This is a particularly marked tendency in nationalisms.

Serbian nationalism.

"Other medieval phenomena also shed some light when it comes to explaining the collective state of mind in Serbia that leads an immense majority to defend the policies of their ultranationalist leaders and to approve of the massacres committed in their name. When the Turks occupy Serbia after the battle of Kosovo Polje and years later, in 1463, Bosnia, the Serbian aristocracy and the heretical Church of the Bogomils, dominant in Bosnia, convert en masse to Islam. The nobles to maintain their privileges and the common people simply to save themselves from the inquisitorial threats of Hungarian Catholicism. The Serbs who converted to the Islamic faith establish themselves as the most loyal nucleus to the Sublime Porte within the elite of non-Turkish officials in the Ottoman Empire. The Serbian peasant people, who remained loyal to their Orthodox religion, lashed by tributary terror and the 'harvests of children' (devshirme, in Turkish) that the Turkish army carried out among Christian families for the conscription of new generations into their Janissary armies, cultivated even more hatred toward the convert than toward the occupier.

When today the primitive Serbian guerrillas, armed peasants incited by Serbian officers and irregulars arrived from Belgrade, indiscriminately kill urban Muslims in Sarajevo, Zvornik or Foča, they feel they are avenging this betrayal, which they consider to be the origin of all the hardships of their ancestors. Those who not only accepted the Turkish invader by betraying the martyr host of Tsar Lazar, but who also adhered to his faith — the Muslim Slavs of Bosnia and the Sandžak— deserve a double death. This is inflicted through the mutilation of corpses, through humiliation and through the rape of women, that forced reversal of history which compels the Muslim woman, and therefore traitor, to carry a Serbian child. This hatred of the renegade and the traitor also lies at the origin of the visceral hostility of the Serbian people toward the Albanians who, according to the legends of Kosovo Polje, soon joined the Ottoman forces on that battlefield and a majority of whom, in fact, converted to Islam in the following centuries" (77).

There exists another form of violence that is associated with the desire to make messianic objectives a reality.

Sokagakkai.

"Only after attacking the lie, attacking and attacking it thoroughly, and erasing it, can a peaceful world exist in which believers, and non-believers too, may live with their spirit at peace" (84).

Reformers. Tyrannicides.

"Mystical regicides, anarchist revolutionaries, nihilists — all claim to be breaking an idol they consider harmful, in order to prepare, through a violent and brutal act, the coming of something more just" (17).

The modalities of attack

The most severe manifestation of attack is homicide, carried out on some occasions by delusional patients as well as by those paranoid contagion groups that advocate the use of violence to achieve their ends.

Paranoia. The Aimée Case.

"On April 10, 193... at eight in the evening, Mrs. Z, one of the actresses most appreciated by Parisian audiences, arrived at the theatre where she was to perform that evening. On the threshold of the stage door, she was approached by an unknown woman who asked her the following question: 'Are you well, Mrs. Z?' She was wearing a cloak with a fur-lined collar and cuffs, gloves, and a handbag; nothing in the tone of the question aroused the actress's suspicion. Accustomed to the tributes of an audience eager to approach its idols, she replied in the affirmative and, in her haste, made to pass. Then the unknown woman, the actress recounted, changed her expression, swiftly drew an open knife from her handbag and, with a gaze charged with the fire of hatred, raised her arm against her. To deflect the blow, Mrs. Z. seized the blade with her hand, severing two flexor tendons in her fingers" (45).

The Jealous.

"[...] morbid jealousy has been implicated in repeated homicides following release from prison or discharge from special hospitals" (23).

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"The resentment and sexual complex he developed was followed by delusions of being harmed and persecutory delusions. He felt that women in particular did not take him seriously but rather looked down on him. To take revenge and free himself, he murdered a young woman, however symbolic it may have been, and attempted suicide..."(66).

Leninist-sectarian groupuscule. SLA.

"Those were the people who had shot and killed Marcus Foster, the Black leader of the East BayArea..." (31).

Torture constitutes a more attenuated form of aggression than homicide and is also practiced by PPIs.

Maoist Leninism.

"There they would take a man who could only carry twentyjinof stones and force him to carry forty, and when the man collapsed and could go on no longer, they would tell him that what was happening to him was because he was a rightist. And when they already had him on the ground, broken, exhausted and defenseless, they forced him to confess his crimes and to betray other people" (20).

While the violence that concerns us most is that directed against people, it can also be directed against objects, which are smashed to pieces, cut up or pulverized and in this way return to their state ofraw material, stripped of the value conferred upon them by human labor and the meanings they had accumulated. The destruction of objects is characteristic ofagitated IPs(which can occur during acute decompensations) and instates of social agitationsuch as that suffered by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution.

Maoist Leninism.

"The USSR had failed because it had not razed the ruling class to the ground; that is why China was going to tear out by the roots the last weapon remaining to its residual bourgeoisie: culture. Thus was born the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

[...] The theorists said that everything old had to be eliminated, meaning —we know this today— that the backward ideas and prejudices of feudal society were impeding the progress of socialism. And the impetuous and ill-informed Red Guards understood that historical monuments, classical literature, temples and even some elderly people were 'old things' and did away with them physically without any kind of consideration" (61).

This quote requires a small rectification. The Red Guards misinterpreted nothing and no one. Their destructive zeal responded to the slogans launched by Mao himself, with whose full backing they counted and who never reproached them for the vandalistic behaviors that he himself had driven.

Verbal aggressiveness deserves separate mention; in human beings it plays the role that the ritualization of combat between conspecifics plays in other species, with the aim of reducing harm. This form of violence, which spares physical contact, takes the form of threats, insults and reproaches.

Delusion of grievance. The Aub Case.

"In 1887, sentenced to one month in prison, he writes: 'People will hear of me,' and reacting as he had lived, that is, in imbalance, he transforms himself into a dispenser of justice: he wants to set an exceptional example. He utters death threats against the judges who condemned him..." (74).

Paranoid commune. The Charles Manson Family.

"However, some remained loyal to Charlie and tried to free him through spectacular actions. Such as Lynette Fromme, in 1975, with her failed attack on United States President Gerald Ford; or Sandra Good, who in 1977 sent 3,000 threatening letters to presidents and managers of companies whom she considered destroyers of the environment" (18).

With a certain frequency, insults plague the harangues of IP…

Delusion of grievance. The Aub Case.

"Today I have drawn my lottery, which Jules Ferry has won. I am delighted, it came up him; he is the venomous fly, the chrysalis hornet of cholera-morbus, capable of transforming itself and wrapping itself up, queen of a swarm of swindlers ready to spread across our poor France" (74).

Reformers. Case of Edward V.

"He believed in the goodness of man, but of simple, primitive man, and affirmed the degrading influence of civilization; hence his violent diatribes against the powerful of the earth, to whom he never addressed himself without calling them 'vile dogs,' 'bloodthirsty brutes,' 'ignoble gluttons,' and other pleasantries that were the cause of his misfortunes" (17).

Soviet Leninism.

"The memory of the role played by Lenin in the tragic history of the Constituent Assembly could end here were it not for the fact that in the autumn of 1918 Karl Kautsky wrote a pamphlet entitled 'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat', which Vorvski sent to Lenin from Scandinavia. Kautsky addressed the subject without beating around the bush. Lenin was outraged; he had never been able to tolerate personal criticism. He was perfectly happy to lash out at everyone else, but he was bothered by attacks directed at his own person, particularly when they were justified. The analysis by Kautsky, balanced and well-argued, laid bare the profoundly anti-democratic nature of Lenin's Bolshevism, and he was not going to let it pass. The battle was on all fronts, the Soviet regime was genuinely threatened, the republic was suffering from severe famine, banditry, and terror, but the insult had to be answered. Lenin, setting aside the endless tasks of governance, devoted himself to drafting a reply: 'The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky'. That work, of around a hundred pages, is typical of Lenin's 'scientific' style: pragmatic and categorical in its judgments, more political than theoretical, laced with insults of such magnitude that one might wonder whether the author was indeed a Russian intellectual. Kautsky, one of the most respected figures in international socialism, was on the receiving end of such epithets as 'Judas Kautsky', 'renegade', 'swindler', 'blind puppy', 'sycophant of the bourgeoisie', 'swine', 'arse-licker of rogues and bloodsuckers'. Lenin accused him of engaging in 'contemptible trickery', of 'abject lies', and symbolically consigned him to 'the common grave of renegades'" (82).

(…) as well as the reproaches, whether truthful or false.

Sectarian groups. El Patriarca.

"Whenever some administration has stopped subsidizing internments at El Patriarca centers, or some parent has reported the irregularities riddling the organization's operations... The immediate reaction, repeated on countless occasions, is the mobilization of all parents to demonstrate publicly and support the 'great and necessary work of Engelmajer' and, of course, to denounce as 'accomplices of the traffickers' (the organization's preferred slogan) all those who criticize them" (71).

In a society in which it is taken for granted that the monopoly on violence and punishment belongs to the State, it comes as no surprise that a good proportion of paranoid individuals channel their vengeance, their desire for self-protection, or their need to have suffered affronts redressed through the judicial system.

Folie à Deux. Clinical case.

"He accused his neighbors of stealing several objects from him and decided to take legal action" (15).

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Interviewed by the social worker, she claimed that all authorities were acting illegally and threatened legal action before the European Court of Human Rights" (28).

Paranoid individuals place great importance on their legal battles, prepare for them, study them, and even go so far as to dispense with any outside help.

Querulants.

"Litigants often act as their own representatives by choice..." (72).

Finally, one must not forget that the paranoid individual may use third parties to attack his enemies.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

A patient with a delusion of more than 30 years' duration that her husband and sister-in-law were stealing personal objects from her would pray to St. Gemma asking her to allow her sister-in-law to experience a suffering as great as her own. According to the patient, as a result of her prayers, the sister-in-law developed breast cancer.

The struggle against inhuman enemies

The attack is not directed solely against people. Thus, the hypochondriac paranoid individual will attempt to eliminate viruses and bacteria through repetitive washing that recalls the washing of obsessive individuals, but without the typical ritualization of the latter's behavior. What matters to the paranoid individual is not the precision in the fulfillment of his hygienic duties, but rather the extermination of pathogenic agents, whatever the cost.

Sectarian groups. The Sullivanians.

"When we became aware of the danger of AIDS, we stopped eating at restaurants and sterilized phones, keyboards and even the paws of our pets after they had walked through the city streets" (80).

Faced with germs, the IP goes so far as to apply the methods of a genuine chemical war.

Delusion of dermatozoic infestation.

"Edwards (1977) describes a patient who bathed in gasoline every day and a patient of Bleumel (1938) soaked her hair in kerosene" (56).

There is another type of war, one that unfolds without fanfare, which is the one the IPP wages against the bad part of itself, which it never manages to annihilate completely despite trying relentlessly.

Maoist Leninism.

"All of us cadres, whatever post we hold, are servants of the people, and everything we do is done in the service of the people. How, then, can we be reluctant to rid ourselves of our shortcomings?" (53).

Leninist-sectarian groupuscule. SLA.

"Fahiza told me that all the comrades in the SLA cell had previously lived as I had. 'All of us have the weaknesses of our upbringing and constantly have to struggle, even now, against the putrid disease of the bourgeois mentality'" (31).

The battle against demons and other incorporeal enemies takes on varied strategies.

Nueva Acrópolis

"For example, bad thoughts or depressive states are considered to be caused by mental bodies that exist in the air and can be sent by enemies, or by the negative part of our personality. The esoteric way to combat them is to catch them with the hand, with its energy, in order to throw them away and destroy them. It is curious to see doctors and university professors warding off negative mental forces as they walk through the hallways; what may seem like madness, or a joke, is observed as something mystical and too profound for outsiders to understand..." (65).

Other strategies are, without doubt, considerably more drastic...

Sectarian groups. Community Chapel.

"On March 20, 1986, Janet Cole drove from Seattle to Portland and drowned her 5-year-old daughter, Brittany, in a motel bathtub. The attractive thirty-seven-year-old mother, described by friends as the ideal Christian woman, was convinced that she was possessed by the devil and that a similar fate would likely befall her daughter. She wanted the little girl to go to heaven and for that reason committed an act of love by killing her" (24).