Studies in Paranoia

Excerpt from Studies in Paranoia: Periodic Paranoia and the Origin of Paranoid Delusions

At the present time it is almost a commonplace to remark that no problem is so intricate as the paranoia question. For most, the time to quarrel over the meanings of the term itself has gone by. It is practically indifferent to modern students to know that Hippocrates used the term, at times, as synonymous with "dementia" at others, as a broad term to cover all "madness." We are not now interested in philological dissertations, weighty though they may be.

Only the student of the history of mental disorders is at all en-rapport with the varying significance that has been attached to the word as a disease process. In each new generation new confines of mental activities are being investigated, newer methods of solving old problems are arising, refinements in modes of analysis with more sound syntheses are becoming the everyday routine of the student of mental disturbances with the result that for the paranoia concept, as more particularly outlined by Krafft-Ebing and his generation - and which has been our English model for many years - old lines are falling away, new boundaries are being run, and a radical rearrangement of the whole situation is manifest.

It is a significant fact that mental variation as a biological factor in disease processes is coming within the grasp of progressive alienists; fortunately such are becoming less and less interested in being able to attach labels to specimens and stick them away in their mental herbaria and are taking more vital impetus from the study of the processess and mental reactions themselves, independent of the names that may be attached to them. It is this tendency that is uppermost in the papers here presented; namely the endeavor to lay down general principles underlying the clinical pictures, rather than sterile discussions concerning classification. This is particularly noteworthy in Friedmann's paper, in wh…