David Bowden

The following paragraph comes from the recently published "Oxford Guide to the Mind." Any comments?

"Thirdly, paranoiac delusions bear a disconcerting, embarrassing resemblance to the beliefs held and propagated by founders of religions, by political leaders, and by some artists. Such people often make claims on behalf of themselves, their religious ideas, their country, their art, which would be regarded as grandiose and delusional if their ideas did not harmonize with the deeds of their contemporaries and thereby achieve recognition and endorsement. Nowadays anyone who claimed to be the Messiah, who addressed God as his personal father, and asserted that 'he who is not for me is against me' would be at risk of being referred to a psychiatrist and diagnosed a paranoiac. But presumably in the first century AD His Word spoke to many -- as indeed it continues to this day to do. Similarly, any politician who asserted the innate superiority of his own race and claimed that his country was the victim of an international conspiracy would today raise doubts as to his sanity, but in Germany in the 1930s Hitler found all too many people prepared to agree with him. There must, it seems, be some as yet unformulated relationship between the psychology of paranoia and that of prophets and leaders."

-article by Charles Rycroft, located on pp 171-172 in Oxford Guide to the Mind, edited by Geoffrey Underwood. 2001 Oxford University Press.

JL

In the past year and a half I've gotten into Jung (reading Psychology of the Unconscious right now) and a strong argument for his collective unconscious is the fact that in his dealings with various psychological disorders can be found reproduced within the delusions/visions/dreams of these individuals a whole array of religious elements from religions/mythologies that would not be known to the average layperson. I think its been science and rationalism that have intervened and shifted society's perception of these people from spiritual mediums to nuts, perhaps at our loss.