The paranoid style is intrinsically more severely pathological than the others styles considered in this book. It is the only one that, in its more pervasive and extreme forms, involves a psychotic loss of reality. In other respects, also, it generally involves especially severe impairment of normal functioning. However, it would be a mistake to assume that paranoid conditions are invariably psychotic or near psychotic. Characteristically, paranoid modes of functioning, ways of thinking, types of affective experience, and the like, even such specific mental operations as projection, appear in many degrees of severity and, also, are modulated in a great many other ways by other factors and tendencies. Aside from the dimension of severity, there are, descriptively and quite roughly speaking, two types of people who fall within the category of this style: furtive, constricted apprehensively suspicious individuals and rigidly arrogant, more aggressively suspicious, megolomanic ones. Of course, since these are only two differentiations of a more general style, they are by no means sharply distinguishable. One can find representatives of a range of severity from frankly delusional states to, perhaps, moderately severe character distortions in both categories.
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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 26, 2006 6:14 AM.
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