Paranoia: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Paranoid symptoms and paranoid character traits are common yet serious therapeutic challenges. However, the understanding and treatment of paranoid phenomena and paranoid psychodynamics have received relatively scant attention in the psychoanalytic literature, considering the extent and difficulty of the problem. Reassessment, both theoretical and clinical, is timely because there are new findings in our understanding of personality organization, motivations for behavior, and self-esteem regulation. There are new therapeutic approaches to difficult clinical problems that integrate psychodynamic and socio-cultural frameworks, and our theories about paranoia as a mechanism of adaptation to changing environments need reappraisal. The focus of Paranoia: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives is on the nature of the paranoid mechanism in psychological adaptation, with particular attention to an examination of paranoid character pathology. In today's clinical work there are important opportunities to correlate psychoanalytic theory with child development, family therapy, and other areas of study such as systems theory and organizational and group psychology. This volume includes the application of current psychoanalytic thinking to these multiple arenas of psychopathology, social, and organizational functioning and clinical work.