INTERPRETATION of the paranoid alcoholic’s increased capacity for projection after alcoholic indulgence: one might suppose that censorship in the sense of repression (driving into the unconscious) did not exist in the paranoiac, as everything unconscious comes through to the conscious (if only in the form of projection); that alcoholic indulgence leads only to an accentuation of the libido, an activation of the unconscious, resulting in an increase in the work of projection.
The most noticeable feature of alcoholic paranoia is the break-through of homosexuality, masked by hypocritical jealousy of the other sex. In normal men also homosexual sublimation is relaxed after alcoholic indulgence (kissing, embracing, etc.).
What one loves becomes absorbed into one’s ego (introjection), for in the last resort one can love only oneself. When the transition to object-love takes place one introjects (subjectivizes) objective perception. What one does not love (the bad, the vicious, the recalcitrant) is rejected from the conscious by one of the paths available (repression or projection). In paranoia the sense organs for a time correct the originally indefinite, objectless ideas of reference. But soon both sense perceptions and memories submit to the wish to bring the reference feelings into connexion with appropriate objects (illusions, hallucinations, tricks of memory). The paranoiac projects ‘on the basis of the slightest aetiological excuse’.
The paranoiac obviously associates his passions and his un-pleasurable ideas of reference with the fact that his sharpened vision correctly perceives that slight degree of continuous sexual interest, which one might call the tonus of the neuroses, which all men, though they are unconscious of it, display in relation to all living beings; but he exaggerates it quantitatively in his own way.
But paranoiac complaints not only contain an element of truth (Freud) in so far as they are a description of an endopsychic reality; they also possibly contain a trace of objective reality, but distorted into a delusional form.
The paranoiac’s hallucinatory falsifications are a dream-like-wish-fulfilling confirmation of his delusional idea; they represent the victory of the projection wish over the evidence of his senses. The sensation of being watched when wearing new clothes is projected exhibitionism. (A subject for inquiry is whether this sensation is the same in relation to both sexes.)
A dream is a paranoid projection, the transformation into the objective (representation) of a subjective state, of something of which the dreamer is deprived, with a changed symbol1 (wish-fulfilment).
The thing of which the dreamer is deprived is ejected from the ego (to assure the sleeper his rest) and is materialized in the outer world with a changed symbol.2
In dreams we arc like erotomaniacs: every woman is in love with us (i) because we are in reality unsatisfied; (ii) because we hate them.
A patient reported to me a peculiar feeling of being looked at that he experienced on several occasions immediately after full sexual satisfaction. Walking in the street, he had the feeling that the women he passed looked at him with much more interest than he was usually aware of. My first thought was that a feeling of shame must be concealed behind this impression, but this was contradicted by (i) his impression that the women looked at him, not inquisitively or inquiringly, but actually crotically and at the same time provocatively (as he had perfectly correct ideas about his quite inconspicuous physique, he found this perplexing); (ii) the fact that he had this feeling only in relation to the opposite sex spoke against its being projected anxiety; and finally (iii) this tentative explanation did not prevent his having the same sensation on subsequent occasions when the same circumstances were repeated.
I attached greater importance to the matter only when the patient’s wife described the same experience in almost the same words (she had the feeling that men looked at her more than usual).
I then said to myself that projection must be at work, a kind of passagère erotomania. We are capable of attaining sexual satisfaction only at intervals; hence there is a great difference in the level of heterosexual feelings before and after it. The man had projected his sudden lack of interest in the other sex into a feeling of being erotically looked at by women; similarly his wife had projected her feelings into the men who for the time being interested her so little.
Perhaps they also made use of the sexual tonus of passers-by, which they disregarded when they were themselves sexually ‘hypertonic’. The tonus betrays itself in attitude, look and expression.
The feeling of lack of interest for the other sex seems to be so hard to bear that one involuntarily ejects it from the ego and over-compensates for it. Motives: (i) vanity; (ii) a kind of logic, which refuses to admit the existence of such fluctuations in emotional life. (Analogy in paranoia: delusional jealousy on cooling off of interest. Motive: desire to maintain marital loyalty.)
A confirmation from everyday life: so long as one is passionately in love, one is never sure that the feeling is reciprocated; no manner how many signs of her favour are shown by the beloved, doubt persists, and one goes on asking: Do you love me?
However, so soon as one is in ‘peaceful possession’, as the saying is, of one’s partner’s love, so soon as one knows for certain that one is loved, one already has a trace of erotomania; a projection of indifference or turning-away-from with a changed symbol.1
This analysis may have been responsible for the fact that for some time my patient has no longer had this feeling. That would make him my first practically cured case of paranoia.