| [As a disclaimer, the following is not an elaborate troll. When I was a practicing scholar of American Literature, psychoanalysis was one of my areas of specialization. What I write below is/was characteristic of psychoanalytic thought in the context of literary and cultural studies. Having left academia 7 years ago, I can see how some of my fellow HNers might be suspicious of such a seemingly convoluted and obtuse form of discourse.] Though you've been downvoted, the structure of your seemingly casual observation is validated by some of the most renown psychoanalytic and philosophical thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. (In the US, psychoanalysis is largely repudiated as a therapeutic pathway for severe mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia. However, philosophy and psychoanalytic thinking can provide occasionally valuable insights into the nature of human psychology, each capable of being productive and provocative in equal measure.) In _Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses_ (Lacan has been referred to as the "French Freud"), Slavoj Zizek asks readers to > Recall, again, Lacan's outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. [0] This is probably a misattribution by Zizek (or a conflation) since Sigmund Freud makes the comparison in the _Standard Edition_ (XVIII, 226). > Freud suggests that a jealous husband who is obsessed with the idea that his wife is cheating on him can be described as paranoid even if it turns out that his wife is cheating on him. [1] Without question, the priapic over-concern with the possibility of spousal infidelity is characteristic of masculinist psychoanalytic discourse. However, the kernel of truth in this is that one's internal representation is separate from reality, however closely the two may match. In other words, paranoia is pathological (belief in gang-stalking) even if it is matched by a dysfunctional reality (CIA surveillance) and this can be seen in the opposite case of a naive subject who neither suspects nor fears being surveilled despite being surveilled in reality (e.g. a psychologically healthy subject who is targeted by state surveillance). In short, paranoid fantasies may in fact be matched by reality, but that does not make the paranoid fantasies any less paranoid. Conversely, blissful ignorance may be contradicted by reality, but that does not necessarily make the subject any less blissful. (As a bonus, the paragraph from which the Zizek quote is drawn continues in its next sentence to explain how anti-Semitism draws upon psychopathological thinking to validate its ideological end. In other words, anti-Semitism for Zizek is structurally/phenomenologically identical to paranoia.) [0] http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm [1] http://bit.ly/1WKHjQ7 (I hope links using URL shorteners are not contra HN etiquette.) EDIT: Spelling. |