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Paranoia and Pronoia: The Visionary and The Banal

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Abstract

I examine pronoia, Fred Goldner's term for the delusion that others think well of one, in the light of current psychiatric nosology and psychodynamic theory. Pronoia is a form of denial that protects the fragile person's self-esteem from criticism and rejection. It can arise from persistently grandiose thinking in a narcissistic personality. Pronoid behavior can also occur in social structures where individuals are valued not for their interior feeling-life but only for their strategic roles in the larger organization. In contrast to the benevolent misperceptions of pronoia, the paranoid sees hostile forces in the world and weaves them into a satisfying conspiracy. Both pronoia and paranoia create an exaggerated sense of coherence from the chaos and confusion of the social world. Social organizations which accept individual failure and vulnerability can tolerate less of the false coherence of pronoia and paranoia, and so foster the growth of more accurate perception and more intimate interpersonal styles.
... 7 Indeed,Alsuhibani et al. (2022) describe differences in some of the personality traits and characteristics associated with paranoia and those associated with the tendency to endorse conspiracy theories. Then too, narcissistic personality traits may lead individuals to see the world mainly in terms of its ability shore up their fragile selfesteem resulting in a style of thought that sociologist Fred Goldner called "pronoia"(Kirmayer, 1983). ...
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... In one story, objects in the world dissolve leaving slips of paper with their names written on them ("Soft-drink stand"); in another, we discover the characters are programs inside a computer-but then, the programmers of the computer are themselves revealed to be just programs in a still greater computer. In his stories, Dick made a virtue of paranoia's infinite regress (Kirmayer, 1983). ...
Chapter
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... In one story, objects in the world dissolve leaving slips of paper with their names written on them ("Soft-drink stand"); in another, we discover the characters are programs inside a computer-but then, the programmers of the computer are themselves revealed to be just programs in a still greater computer. In his stories, Dick made a virtue of paranoia's infinite regress (Kirmayer, 1983). ...
... In one story, objects in the world dissolve, leaving slips of paper with their names written on them ("Soft-drink stand"); in another, the reader discovers the characters are programs inside a computer-but then, just as reality begins to settle down, the programmers of the computer are themselves revealed to be just programs in a still greater computer. In his stories, Dick made a virtue of paranoia's infinite regress (Kirmayer, 1983). ...
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Fred Goldner's article on pronoia is an example of how the medical model has been used by social scientists to frame social problems. I show the drawbacks and pitfalls of this practice. By comparing pronoia to paranoia, Goldner implies that pronoia is a disease, yet a close comparison of the two shows that pronoia does not yet fit a disease framework. However, the fact that the behaviors which Goldner labels pronoia could easily be medicalized means that it one day may qualify as a disease. I show the risks inherent in this possibility and offer an alternative framework to describing the phenomenon of pronoia.