An Illness of Power

An Illness of Power: Paranoia, Madness, and Security Kevin Swann Affective States Fall 2014 Professor Ann Stoler

Even now you are being monitored. Your movements and words closely scrutinized, your physical and mental development tracked, the data tabulated and charted, the knowledge recorded and subjected to ongoing and cumulative assessment. Government agents foreign and domestic, multinational corporations, potential employers, possible lovers, and rejected exes all access and inspect this information regularly and thoroughly. Spaces are designed to facilitate control: the spaces through which you move do their part to move you. Spaces are designed to promote some movements and to retard others; designed simply to make you knowable, visible, recordable; to make you malleable and docile. For every space there is a functionary: a professional capturing data, controlling movement, enforcing discipline. For every space there are tools designed to watch and to control. These spaces and functionaries are connected in various ways: directly, through centralized control; through the common language or overlapping languages through which they speak; through shared ideas; through the very fact that you are moved through them. These spaces are organized, logical, pervasive. A vast machine, influencing.

Kevin Swann An Illness of Power

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“Paranoia is an illness of power in the most literal sense of the words and exploration of this illness uncovers clues to the nature of power clearer and more complete than those which can be obtained in any other way.” -Elias Canetti (1960) “The Truth Is Out There” “Trust No One” -The X-Files Introduction: Paranoid Writing What does it mean to take paranoia as an illness of power? For Elias Canetti (1960) it

means that paranoia is the psychological affliction of those who have or desire power (448). For

the powerless, paranoia is the belief that what prevents one from coming into the power that is

rightfully theirs are the plots and machinations of others. For the powerful, paranoia is the belief

that those without power are scheming to take it. In both cases there is a conspiracy, and the

paranoiac is its target. For the paranoid there is no equality. There are those with power and

those without it. The paranoid universe is expansive and heliocentric. All that exists revolves

around the paranoiac himself: they see the Hobbesian (1651) war “of every man against every

man” as a war of all against one (185). If in the first place to take paranoia as an illness of power

is to see it as the psychology of conflict, in the second place paranoia is an effect of the exercise

of power. Paranoia is an analytic of power that uncovers clues to its nature because paranoid

delusions index the ways in which power is exercised (Canetti 1960: 448).

One sentence in and there is already a problem. What kind of paranoia is this illness of

power? How can the delusions of the extremely mentally impaired index power in the same way

as the thoughts of the security official whose job is to imagine the worst and to look for

conspiracies around every corner? Or do we take paranoia as an emotive, as a name that

identifies a mental state in order to work on it (Reddy 1997: 331)? Certainly there must be a

difference between the delusions of the paranoid schizophrenic and the worldview of the

realpolitik (or worse, the “realist”) operator or security regime official; something must


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differentiate the security official or intelligence officer from the mentally ill. What if, however,

nothing does? When Freud and his interlocutors first analyzed paranoia they remarked that, aside

from his persecutory fantasies the paranoiac was in no way impaired ([1911] 1963: 90). What if

these paranoias are not even different in degrees, but different only in their mode of

manifestation?

To take these paranoias as the same, insofar as they are all illnesses of power, is to avoid

one of the ironies of paranoia. Paranoia is always concerned with a vast conspiracy, but a

paranoid is always a single person. For Foucault ([1978] 1990) power is not something one has,

it is rather “a moving substrate of force relations” that are in themselves unequal (93). Power, in

this sense, is always a relation. For paranoia to be an illness of power then it must index and

reflect relations of force. For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ([1997] 2008) “a schizophrenic

on a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst’s couch” because where the

neurotic is isolated and individuated, the paranoid is plugged in to a myriad of processes (2). To

use paranoia as an analytic of power, then, is first to take all paranoias as analytics of power.

Second, taking paranoia as an analytic of power is not to differentiate the delusional from the

actual, nor is it to judge the analyses of paranoia on their merits, but it is to see how all of this

paranoid talk indexes power relations at work.

Finally, to take paranoia as an analytic of power is not to say what power is definitively,

but instead to examine what kinds of powers are at play, how they operate, and what possibilities

and experiences they make available. It is also to designate a space from which to write. In this

space what constitutes paranoia as such is as much an index of power as the stuff of paranoid

delusions themselves. In this paper, I seek to stay in the space of paranoia—a space of spiraling

connections and associations—without piercing its veil. At the same time, I chart the


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crystallization of paranoia: the moment when a catchall for madness’ “delusional sector” became

a pervasive fear of persecution at the hands of the puissant Other. In doing so I try to keep in

tension paranoia as an affliction and paranoia as a structure of feeling to see what tendrils of

power link the individual to the social; the mad to the powerful (Williams 1978).

To write in a paranoid space is to think, if not against Foucault’s notion of power, then

perhaps askance of it. In The History of Sexuality Foucault argues against the view that power

always “masks itself,” that it can only operate in secret (86). This, he argues, is a view of power

as essentially cynical. For Foucault power is best understood as not only often visible, but also

generative (even when it represses) of a truth that could not pre-exist it. For the paranoiac, power

is always unseen, furtive, repressive, and cynical. The paranoiac alone has pierced the veil to see

power at work. At the same time, paranoia presupposes a distinction between truth and

appearances. If for Foucault “effects of truth are produced within discourses which are in

themselves neither true nor false,” the paranoiac sees, or thinks they see, the truth lurking beyond

the veil of the truth effect (1980: 118). The paranoiac is thus, in Foucauldian terms,

fundamentally cynical. To write in a paranoid mode is to take the claims of the paranoid and

their interlocutors as true insofar as they all index the operations and logics of power that are not

seen but experienced by the subject.

Soul Murder

Prior to the late 19th century paranoia had little of the descriptive exactitude it now has.

Since its first recorded use in John Barrow’s (1749) Dictionarium Medicum Universale, paranoia

was another in a seemingly endless list of terms that described mental defects like delirium,

derangement, dementia, and so forth. By the late 1800s when the psy- arts, particularly

psychiatry and psychoanalysis, were opening the expanses of the human mind and finding a


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wealth of new derangements and afflictions, paranoia began to take its present shape. An 1887

entry in the British Journal of the Mental Science describes paranoia in much the same way as it

is currently known, as an affliction “manifesting in delusions of persecution, or hallucinations, or

delusions of grandeur” (602). The Journal also offers that these “new” understandings of

paranoia “evolved of late by German and Italian alienists” such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung,

and Sándor Ferenzi (1887: 602).

While these German and Italian alienists, as the practitioners of the psy- sciences were

then known, were developing paranoia out of their own work with individual patients, their

major work on the affliction came out of their engagement with a single case. Moreover, none of

these men ever analyzed the patient who would eventually become emblematic of paranoia,

German senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, in person. Rather, their analyses came from their

interactions with Schreber’s treating physician and, later, their reading of Schreber’s published

account of his paranoia, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Schreber’s account details two periods

of mental illness, the first in 1884, a prolonged bout of extreme hypochondria for which he was

hospitalized and by all accounts cured, and the second in 1893 for which he was again sent to an

asylum to be treated, as he was in 1884, by Professor Paul Fleschig (1996: 62). Schreber’s

second period of illness began with insomnia, followed by the return of his hypochondria (he

believed, for example, that his brain was softening and that his body was slowly decaying). It

was after his hospitalization that Schreber began to have delusions of persecution (particularly by

Professor Fleschig) and religious visions (1996: 88).

Nerves: senatspräsident Schreber’s affliction was one of nerves. He began to see them

everywhere. The universe is a web of nerves worked on by rays (Schreber 2000: PG). “The

human soul is contained in the nerves of the body,” he begins his Memoir (2000: 45). Vibrations


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of the nerves bring pleasure or pain, the nerves form the intellect and move the muscles of the

body, God is made of pure nerves without a body (2000: 46). God had also set Schreber on a

mission: to redeem the world and bring an age of peace and enlightenment. To do that, God was

working “miracles” on Schreber’s nerves: miracles that would change Schreber’s male nerves

into female nerves. He feared that some people, seeing his change, would take advantage and use

his body for “purposes contrary to the order of things” (2000: 78). To do so, to take Schreber’s

power through abusing his changing body, would be “soul murder” (2000: 55). Schreber’s

doctors were at pains to reconcile his delusions of persecution and his religious visions with his

otherwise normal state of mind. His memory and intelligence were unaffected, he retained his

keen and encyclopedic knowledge of art, politics, and science, and on many occasions he was

able to help his doctors with legal matters (2000: 272, 279). Though in every other way

unimpaired, Schreber still maintained that he was the target of miracles—that he was destined to

redeem the world, and that his physician, Professor Fleschig, was trying to murder his soul

(2000: 271).

For Freud, Schreber’s delusions of persecution at the hands of Fleschig and his belief that

to redeem the world he must first become a woman were deeply interconnected (1996: 93). That

Schreber became less fearful of sexual abuse as his complex religious system developed signaled

to Freud that both Schreber’s persecution fears and his religious visions developed out of his

homosexual longing for his father, which he then transferred to his supposed persecutor, Fleschig

(1996: 118). Freud sees Schreber’s second bout of illness as a manifestation of an unnamable

desire: to see Fleschig again and to become a woman for him (1996: 118). Struggling against his

desire, Schreber’s delusion shifted from becoming a woman for Fleschig, to being persecuted by

him, obstructing Schreber’s mission to redeem the earth (1996: 123).


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Freud found the key to understanding paranoia not in the specific details of Schreber’s

delusions or those of any other paranoiac, but rather in the mechanism that forms paranoiac

symptomology (1996: 135). Freud locates this mechanism in a disruption of normal

psychosexual development: the child never outgrows their childish same-sex object attachments

set during the narcissistic phase (1996: 137). In its less problematic form, arrested development

in the narcissistic phase leads to manifest homosexuality, when these attachment become

repressed, as Freud believes they did for Schreber, they result in paranoia. Freud demonstrates

the process of homosexuality becoming paranoia as an argument in which the unconscious tries

to transform the offending urge. “I (a man) love him,” becomes “I do not love him, I hate him,”

becomes, “he hates me,” and finally, “I hate him because he persecutes me” (1996: 139). This

understanding of paranoia as “a ‘defense’ against homosexual love,” psychologist Morton

Schatzman (1972) notes, was the norm for psychoanalysis for much of the 20th century (39).

That Freud’s analysis avoids any examination of Schreber’s childhood makes his account

not only unique in his oeuvre but also problematic, if not simply for the fact that Schreber’s

father, Moritz Schreber, was a widely published and extremely popular author of over eighteen

books on childrearing. Reading Schreber the son’s Memoir along side Schreber the father’s

childrearing guides, Schatzman argues that Schreber’s paranoia was not a defense against his

homosexual longing at all. Schreber in fact had been persecuted by his father and this

persecution was transformed later in life to paranoid religious visions (1972: 39). In Schatzman’s

account, the “miracles of heat and cold” in which “the blood is forced out of [Schreber the son’s]

extremities, so causing a subjective feeling of cold” reflects Schreber the father’s belief that

“starting about three months after birth cleansing of the infant’s skin should be by cold ablutions

only…in order to physically toughen up the child” (1972: 41). The “compression of the chest


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miracle,” which “consisted of the whole chest being compressed” such that Schreber could

barely breathe, Schatzman compares to his father’s use of the Schrebersche Geradhalter, an iron

device designed to promote good posture by making bad posture physically unbearable (1972:

44, 45). These and the other practices Schreber the child endured, Schatzman argues, were later

transformed into a complex of paranoid delusions and religious visions.

Schatzman argues that one of the bitterest ironies of the Schreber case is that a man

famous as a pedagogue of childrearing begat a son famous as a psychotic (1972: 40). But bitter

ironies abound if we also consider that our present understanding of paranoia is based on the case

of a man whose fantasies of persecution were to a large extent real. Most glaring, however, is the

fact that Schreber the father’s beliefs about childrearing themselves border on paranoid. His

parenting technique involved the exercise of complete domination over the child through the

suppression of all of their desires, the control of all of their movements by mechanical means,

and the strategic use of pain (1972: 50). These practices reflected his belief that children were

born unreasonable, ill, and criminal and that to become rational adults, their bodies and desires

must be subjected to strict, unwavering discipline (1972: 50). “If we habituate the child to the

Good and Right,” Schreber the elder writes, “we prepare him to do the Good and Right later with

consciousness and out of free will” (Schatzman 1972: 50). Schatzman argues that Schreber and

an entire generation of German children were the subjects of a conspiracy by their parents,

organized by the author of books that sold nearly 40 editions in seven languages (62). That such

a conspiracy hints at an underlying anxiety: the fear that reason might not be a universal human

trait at all. Rather as Uday Mehta (1992) points out, reason, like individuality, was both an

assumption and an aspiration of liberal political theory (125). To achieve rationality, and hence

individuality, the individual and his capacity must be constructed, a process that reveals deep


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anxieties about the naturalness of the notions of freedom, individuality, and reason that gird

liberal political theory (1992: 127).

If on the one hand Schreber’s manifest symptoms evidence the anxiety that lurks beneath

the surface of liberal political thought, on the other they provide an analytic of the paternalism

that underwrites classical political theory. Looking to Hobbes’ Leviathan and Plato’s Laws,

political scientist James Glass (1988) argues that paranoia, “an obsession with domination,

distrust and persecution,” animates these authors arguments and the bodies of political theory

indebted to them (211). In an argument indebted to Schatzman’s, Glass reads Schreber’s

paranoia as an introjection of a sprawling Oedipal nightmare in which any attempt to subvert the

rule of the Father/power-figure leads to increased domination and emasculation (1988: 215). In

his reading, Schreber the father’s beliefs on childrearing, like the Oedipus complex itself, is

merely a Hobbesian political rationality writ small (1988: 214).

However, perhaps Schatzman goes too far in making Schreber the elder the locus of this

conspiracy. If Schreber’s ideas were widely accepted as legitimate it is in part because similar

disciplinary logics had been in circulation for some time. Foucault notes that “the body as object

and target of power,” as the object of disciplinary power, was known since at least the classical

age (1975: 136). Compare for example Schreber the father’s thoughts on bodily comportment:

One must see to it that children always sit straight and even sided on both buttocks at once…leaning neither to the right or left side…as soon as they start to lean back…or bend their backs, the time has come to exchange at least for a few minutes the seated position for the absolutely still, supine one. […] Half resting in lying or wallowing positions should not be allowed: if children are awake they should be alert and hold themselves in straight, active positions. (Schatzman 1972: 42)

with Foucault’s description of the training of soldiers:

By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body,


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mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning the silently into the automatism of habit. (1975: 135)

On the one hand the miracles performed on the formless clay of his body hints at the social

ubiquity of disciplinary power. On the other his fears of soul murder and his belief that Fleschig

was persecuting him hints at the development of psychiatric power in the late 19th century (Rose

1998; Foucault 2006).

To take Schreber’s paranoia as an analytic first means to see what modes of power, such

as discipline and psychiatric power, were at work in producing his condition. Second, it means to

attend to the mechanics that give his paranoia its shape. A common feature of schizophrenic

visions is the influencing machine (Tausk 1988). “The schizophrenic influencing machine is a

machine of a mystical nature…it consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, batteries, and

the like,” psychologist Victor Tausk (1988) notes (186). It “serves to persecute the patient and is

operated by his enemies” (1988: 186). The machine is the apparatus by which one’s persecutors

act at a distance. And while those persecuted are able to imagine the machine, they admit that

some of its construction is beyond their ability to imagine or explain. Of importance to the

influencing machine is how closely it resembles technology. It is as if the paranoiac needs to

concoct some rational means to describe the mechanism of their persecution, and they look to

technological means of acting at a distance for ingredients. Thomas Haskell (1985) has argued

that causal perception, the ability to perceive one action as precipitating another, is intimately

linked to the knowledge about how to make things happen at a distance (357). This knowledge,

borrowing a term from philosopher Douglas Gasking, he calls “recipe knowledge”: the tools,

techniques, know-how, and instructions for yielding particular results (357). Here, the social

availability of particular tools and knowledge is central to the creation of recipes that act at a

distance.


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Nerves: nerves offered Schreber a recipe to imagine his own influencing machine.

Knowledge about nerves is central to the recipe of Schreber’s paranoia, despite his admission

that “about their physical structure [he], as a layman, cannot say,” he is also able to describe their

“extraordinarily delicate structure—comparable to the finest filaments” in much the same way

that they were described in the developing neurological discourse of his era (Schreber 2000: 45).

Nerves were also a part of other recipes as well. If the development of neurology in the late 19th

century provided new ways to theorize the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the

body, it also provided new recipes to imagine the relationship between the individual and the

social. For William Cullen, the most widely known scientist of the enlightenment, “the nervous

body was a microcosm of a nervous society; on this body could be scripted the culture’s vitality”

(Rousseau 2010: 133). This analogy works in both ways: nervous individuals make for a nervous

society while frayed nerves indicate a similarly fraying social fabric (Rousseau 2010: 135).

In his Memoirs Schreber notes that despite what he knows of the structure of existence, of

nerves and rays and conspiracies and miracles, he is “only a human being and therefore bound to

the limits of human understanding” (2000: 45). Canetti notes that this understanding, limited

though it may be, “has come infinitely closer to the truth than any other human” (1960: 435).

What is this truth? First, that neurology and psychology were rapidly becoming a vector of

power. Second, that disciplinary power was becoming more pervasive, even as it continued to

betray widespread but unspoken anxieties about human rationality. Third, that non-normative

modes of sexuality were becoming a biopolitical concern such that they were seen as the root of

all other forms of psychological illness.

To a certain degree Schreber understood that he was persecuted and as such his paranoia,

on one level, was the paranoia of the powerless—of the actually persecuted. Within the complex


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of Schreber’s visions, however, his paranoia is another thing entirely. Canetti notes that the sense

“of personal place, or position, is of cardinal importance” for the paranoid in general and

Schreber in particular (436). Messianic redeemer, locus of miracles strung in a web of nerves on

the one hand, victim of attempted soul murder on the other, Schreber’s position in his paranoid

schema is a position of extreme, if not cosmic importance. His is an “exalted position to defend

and make secure” (Canetti 1960: 436). In this sense Schreber’s paranoia reflects the paranoia of

the elite and the powerful, to which I turn in the following section.

Introjection: Team B and the Mirror of Paranoia

James Glass’ argument on the paranoid factor of classical political thought relies on

processes of psychological introjection: the internalization of the ideas and behaviors one

encounters in the world. Glass offers, first, that in classical political theory the rationale for the

existence of the state is essentially paranoid. The fear of a war of all against all, combined with

the need to defend a threatened social body, both legitimate state rule and potential domination.

Second, he argues that the sovereign, like the father, seeks to reproduce itself through a process

of introjection whereby subjects internalize paranoia, thereby legitimating the state. Paranoia is

here seen as a disruption of the boundary between the inside and the outside: the process of

introjection takes external ideas and makes them appear as if they are internal to the subject.

What if paranoia troubles the boundary between inner and outer in other ways? What if paranoia

works as much by projection, the externalization of one’s subjective experience onto the external

world, as it does through introjection? As Freud, Schatzman, and Canetti’s accounts demonstrate,

paranoia illustrates that the boundary between the inner and the outer is always more troubled

than it appears.


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The conceptual boundary between inner and outer becomes further confused when

paranoia becomes an analytic for state power. Does the boundary between the inside and the

outside correspond to a people, a national border, or to the institutional limits of the state and its

apparatuses? Glass’ account suggests that, insofar as Hobbes and Plato were concerned, state

power seeks to fuse perceptions about state, territory, and population into a singular organism

with its own singular border. Seen in this way paranoia indexes that which threatens the unity

between the state, its people, and its territory. In contemporary politics external threats are often

matched by internal threats who, if they are not in collusion with external enemies, offer them

exploitable weakness. Paranoia here is as much a sense of vigilance against external threats as it

is against internal weaknesses.

In 1975, in response to blistering congressional hearings over botched CIA operations

and under pressure from anti-détente hawks in the Republican Party, then president Gerald Ford

reorganized his top officials, elevating George H. W. Bush to head of the CIA, Richard Cheney

to Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense (Mitchell 2006: 148). Shortly

thereafter, Director Bush approved a novel experiment in intelligence analysis. He would allow

two groups, one comprised of agency “insiders” and another comprised of “outsiders,” to access

and analyze several years of National Intelligence Estimate data in order to develop two

competing assessments of Soviet military aims and capabilities (Mitchell 2006: 148). The goal

was to sharpen the intelligence community’s analyses by opening them to competitive scrutiny.

Stacked with far-right hardliners, (including Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, and Paul Wolfowitz),

Team B produced a report that not only criticized the intelligence community’s own findings, it

also offered a wildly divergent view of Soviet policy and capabilities. I here look to their final

report, Soviet Strategic Objectives: An Alternate View, as a paranoid writing.


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Team B’s report begins by arguing that the intelligence community has misinterpreted

Soviet objectives and capabilities for years, wildly underestimating the “intensity, scope, and

implicit threat” of the USSR (1976: 1). They argue that this misinterpretation is based first on the

intelligence community’s over-reliance on hard data, “data collected by technical means” and a

tendency to “interpret these data in a manner reflecting basic U.S. concepts” and assumptions, a

misreading they call “mirror-imaging” (1976: 1). Hard data are useless, they argue, unless

analysts are first willing to “acknowledge that our adversary is ‘different’ from us,” even at the

level of their basic concepts (1976: 9). For example, the report offers, where it is a basic

assumption in the U.S. that war and peace, offense and defense, arms buildup and arms

limitation are all dichotomous, mutually exclusive terms, in “Soviet thinking these are

complimentary or mutually supporting concepts that by no means exclude one another” (1976:

1). For Team B Soviet thinking conceives of conflict in terms of a “grand strategy” in which

anything, even “peaceful coexistence” can be an element in a strategy to achieve the “worldwide

triumph of socialism” (1976: 5). To see Soviet objectives otherwise would be to project onto

them our own values and aspirations (1976: 9).

Glass notes that one mark of paranoid thinking is the depiction of “force” as always

coming from “without,” producing a pronounced fear of annihilation which, through introjection,

manifests as a compulsion to dominate and control (1988: 212). Here, however, I want to argue

that processes of projection are as much a part of paranoia as processes of introjection. Team B

focused on building a comprehensive profile of Soviet strategic thinking as a conceptual edifice

so that they could then re-interpret the data at hand. The Soviet Union is a “giant conglomerate in

which military, political, and economic institutions…are seen as part of a diversified arsenal of

power,” for example, whereas in the U.S. “the military are not considered an active factor in the


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political life of the country” (1976: 10). Where the U.S. sees war as abnormal and the

employment of weapons of mass destruction as something entirely outside the norms of policy”

the Soviets see such tools as viable elements in a strategy of domination (1976: 11). Where the

U.S. sees military spending as “a social overhead to be curtailed whenever possible” the Soviets

do not (1976: 11). In this view even Soviet investment in détente, SALT, and other diplomatic

initiatives—even efforts at peaceful coexistence—were seen as a part of Soviet “grand design”

for domination. Where data did not support this view it was not because the data was wrong, it

was because data had been analyzed in terms of U.S., rather than Soviet, thinking.

Hofstadter notes that for the paranoid, “the enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect

model of malice, a kind of amoral superman” (1964: 85). Hofstadter also notes that it is difficult

to “resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts a projection of the self; both the ideal

and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to [the enemy]” (85). This thinking is

evident in Team B’s depiction of the Soviet threat. Where the U.S. is essentially a peaceful body

of citizens with a free and open government and a military that is both outside of politics and

considered an undesirable social overhead, the Soviets are a “bloc” in every sense of the word.

They are a massive, integrated apparatus pursuing a grand design of global hegemony in which

everything, war and peace, détente and aggression, arms limitation and arms buildup, are all a

part of an international influencing machine. Even the absence of evidence for Soviet objectives

and capabilities is itself seen as evidence of their presence. For example, in noting that there is

little evidence of Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine systems—systems that could detect and

attack submarines but not be detected by them—Team B reports that this is in fact evidence that

such systems both existed and had already been deployed (1976: 32).


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Is this a projection of fear, or the projection of the ideal self onto the other? It is hard to

determine what elements of Team B’s assessment are introjections and what are projections,

which elements are idealized depictions of us and which are demonic accounts of them, so

troubled is the conceptual boundary between inner and outer in the report. To see paranoia as a

dynamic interpenetration of the inner and outer, as Glass offers, illustrates that “the more

paranoid the self’s theoretical construction, the more pathological is its belief system” (213). In

such a system enemies begin to proliferate both without (the Soviets) and within (the intelligence

community itself). If the Soviets had been able to become the much more virile power that Team

B describes, it is in part because the U.S. intelligence apparatus is partially to blame. Intelligence

officials had become complacent in properly assessing the Soviet threat. The Soviets are patient,

persistent, and “willing to use all available means to mold all aspects of the correlation of forces

(social, psychological, political, economic and military) so as to strengthen themselves and to

weaken any prospective challengers” (3). The greatest threat, Team B suggests, is not Soviet

strength, but a lack of U.S. vigilance.

In the paranoid imagination the distinction between the self and the enemy is clear and

the terms of conflict are existential: the enemy poses a threat to the integrity of the self that must

be overcome by total mastery of the self and the other (1988: 212). Hypervigilance is the only

way to avoid the threat of self-dissolution (1988: 212). For Hobbes and Plato, this means

creating a force of domination within the self in the form of the sovereign. For Schreber the elder

it meant containing the enemy within (his own children) through a continuous disciplinary

regime. For Schreber the younger it meant succumbing to the miracles that threatened to change

him from a man to a woman. For Team B it meant overcoming the American intelligence

community and steering the course of American politics. Even as they were drafting what would


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become their report, Team B’s members were leaking their findings to the press not as

conjectures from an exercise, but as legitimate intelligence (Mitchell 2006: 149). The effects

were a severe weakening of public faith in détente, increased public fear of the Soviets, and the

expansion of military spending and intelligence operations—the bureaucratization of paranoid

vigilance (Mitchell 2006: 149).

Glass looks to the paranoia that leads to the bureaucratization of vigilance, finding it in

Platonic and Hobbesian political thought. What interests Glass is the hermetic and totalizing

nature of these political works and how these works project a “closed system defining the

relation between politics and power, nature and authority” onto the world itself (1988: 214).

Over time, the Hobbesian sovereign and its bureaucratic apparatus comes to act as a massive

influencing machine that seeks to force subjects to introject domination in much the same that

Schreber’s father advocated for children (1988: 216). Glass writes: “it is a political coercion as

deadly and serious as the parent who creates the psychological conditions within the family

nexus that literally force the child to internalize, as its own, the parent’s images of the world, the

self, right and wrong (1988: 214).

For Team B the interplay between projection and introjection is more complicated. If

they were projecting their fears onto the Soviets, then they were also advocating that the U.S.

change its position on détente, arms reduction, and efforts at peaceful coexistence becoming

more, rather than less, like the threat they described. Perhaps, then, they were not projecting their

fears at all but instead projecting a vision of themselves onto the Soviet threat. Jacques Lacan

(2006) argues that during the mirror stage the child identifies with the image of bodily unity and

personal mastery that it sees in the mirror over its own experience of bodily fragmentation and

weakness (78). The ego introjects the image it misrecognizes as itself in the form of paranoia—


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the knowledge that the self is fragmented, disjointed, and weak persecutes the idealized self-as-

image. When the child enters into social relations, it begins to desire the unity and puissance that

it projects onto the image of the Other by desiring what they desire (2006: 355).

It is hard not to read Team B’s description of the Soviets without noticing how strong and

unified the Soviets are depicted and how weak the U.S. seems in comparison. Similarly, it is hard

not to see how clearly articulated and considered the Soviet’s perceived desires are and how

comparatively nebulous U.S. strategic concerns seem. For Lacan this play of desire and image

mirrors the recursive looping effects of paranoid knowledge—the knowledge of the self as

mediated by the image and desires of the other. At the same time, Team B argues that the

intelligence community’s weakness is just as much a threat as the Soviet’s strength. The

intelligence community sees the Soviets as less threatening because their analyses are based on

“mirror imaging:” seeing the Soviets as being like ourselves (1976: 1).

Paranoid Thoughts

Canetti notes that within the space of paranoia the paranoid and the powerful are exact

images of each other, “the only difference between them lies in their position in the world”

(1960: 462). To write from within the paranoid space circumscribed by these two positions is not

to take a stance about the truth of one conspiracy or paranoid-vision or another, but rather to

follow what truths constitute and are constituted within paranoia itself: to chart their relations to

power, and to move between them without pulling back the curtains. I have tried to examine

what connects the two not by examining their claims, but rather by teasing out the grammar of

paranoia itself to see what it says about power as it is experienced by those who exercise it and

those who are subject to it. In this sense I have tried to treat paranoia as social theory in the form

of illness.


18

Talal Asad (2011) has focused his recent work on pain because pain “directs us to the

human body as a finite organism” (657). He relates pain to hypochondria to illustrate the ways

that the relations between the buffered self (here I read the buffered self as similar to Lacan’s

self-as-image-of-bodily-unity) and the objective world are “often accidental, post hoc, recursive,

and practical”—mediated, in the case of hypochondria, by medical discourses about illness and

insanity and naturalist assumptions about the body and its limitations (2011: 658). The existence

of hypochondria indexes a modern, secular world at the same time that the hypochondriac’s

search to seek meaning through the experience of their pain hints at experiences that are beyond

the limits of, but speak back to secular, modern epistemology (2011: 659).

I have tried to argue that paranoia speaks back to the project of modernity in much the

same way that the hypochondriac does to the project of secularism. At its most superficial level,

the search for meaning that animates both paranoia and hypochondria is that which disappears

when it is made to fit a classificatory schema that sharply delineates the mad from the

reasonable. This has certainly been true with Schreber, whose search for meaning in the wake of

the abuse he suffered was erased in the moment when he ceased to be Schreber the man and

became Schreber the Case. What else was erased in this moment? In his introduction to

Foucault’s History of Madness Ian Hacking (2006) notes that what disappeared over the course

of the elaboration of psychiatric discourse was “unreason”—“madness in the wild…

prediscursive, inaccessible, pure” (xii). The voice of unreason is that which we can no longer

hear, obscured by the totalizing voices of reason and madness. After Hacking, I have taken

Schreber’s madness as the lingering grin hinting at the shape of the now faded Cheshire Cat of

unreason in order to piece together, where I can, the story that it sought to tell (xii).


19

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