Review
Always worth reading for his tour de force analysis of the archetype that informs a phenomenon or idea as well as its images, Hillman's study of paranoia as "a meaning disorder" is both penetrating and provocative. He begins by setting the context of paranoia at the liminal edge where "psychology cannot be fully separated from religion--religion as relation with divinity and as relation with community ... where psycholgoy is drawn to consider theology and politics." He arranges his discussion accordingly and focuses on understanding the language of what constitutes a ..correct vs. "incorrect" revelation in the paranoid context that can be divine, clinical, or both. Before presenting the three case histories that comprise the majority of this work, Hillman defines paranoia as a true disorder of interpretating the meaning of things: the presence of "incorrigible delusions." He then proceeds to demonstrate how paranoia has engaged and intrigued philosophical inquiries as well as medical psychology. The three case studies include Anton Boisen, a Presbyterian minister; John Perceval, son of British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval; and the famous Freud case of Daniel Paul Schreber. In an era when similar acute paranoid cases would be institutionalized and have their "hidden" malady allopathically treated with heavy tranquilizers, it is remarkable to read compelling autobiographical accounts from persons who were conscious of the invasive paranoia as the process took its course and who were, simultaneously, conscious of the enormously intrusive nature of the illness in their psyches. In addition, each account reads as a powerful narrative of the Self strugging to understand the meaning of the Self. As Hillman points out~ "the archetype of meaning in Jung's system is the Self," and that "it follows then that paranoia as a meaning disorder is a Self disorder." Hillman anatornizes each case by letting the individuals speak for themselves through their own writing (all three men published detailed accounts of their illnesses), and he weaves the cases together by finding parallel patterns of experience among them. Ultimately, Boisen and Perceval were "cured" by learning to understand their illness (paranoia as "spirit's speech" literalized and rigidly acted upon without a simultaneous consciousness of its "noetic" quality, its otherness, its capacity to alienate the Self that perceives it) and to carry through "...the delusion itself .. in a playful mode, learning to elude the delusions, to trick the trickster, using imagination to cure the imagination." -- From Independent Publisher
