Word: paranoia
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Ernest Jones, official biographer of Sigmund Freud, seemed to agree with those sentiments when he wrote in 1930: "Chess...is a play substitute for the art of war." But in the same essay, The Problem of Paul Morphy, which discussed the paranoia that beset the American chess prodigy of the 1850s, he also moved Freud's much-debated interpretation of Oedipus onto the chessboard. Morphy, in Jones' somewhat questionable theory, had to sublimate a strong Oedipal urge to "kill the father." His own flesh-and-blood father was already dead, but Morphy had a surrogate father, Howard Staunton...
...Fiedler, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello represent "the paranoia about blacks which Shakespeare shared with the pit," that is, the commoners in the audience. Now Shakespeare and his audience could have spent a lifetime without seeing a black. Only in Hitch cock or Pinter can one develop paranoia over an unseen "stranger." In Othello, black and white are not racist, but imagistic counters. It is Othello who is white in his innocent gullibility and Iago who is black in his "motiveless malignity." Both men are complementary halves, like day and night...
...Secretaries who talked about their work over coffee breaks were always reprimanded," comments one former employee who says the atmosphere where she worked was one of paranoia...
...Lehman was going to make it a film for the ears, he could at least have been faithful to the book. Roth's Portnoy eventually loses and gains inhibitions in Israel: he loses paranoia in the Homeland where everything is Jewish ("I am playing in a sea full of Jews! Look at their Jewish limbs moving through the Jewish water!") but he also loses his potency. Internal restrictions replace imagined outer ones. And kvetching gets you nowhere...
...first line of defense is what less high-strung observers might call simple paranoia. Harrington himself tells the story of visiting a friend in San Francisco and pulling down the blinds because, he says, "I found myself explaining that in the exposed living room I made too easy a target." But at the end the author also finds himself explaining that psychopaths have certain valuable qualities: their daring mocks our caution, their sense of self shames our self-effacement. Swept on by his own rhetoric, Harrington concludes with a bizarre version of the New Mysticism, in which the psychopath...