H. is not insane in the ordinary sense, but he is one of those
paranoid persons we spoke of previously. Turn to L., a true case
of mental disease, a paranoid whose career strangely resembles
some of the great historic paranoids, for it must be remembered
that man has been imposed upon by those who deceived themselves,
who fully believed the strange and incredible things they
succeeded in making credible to others.
The fantastic paranoid is made up of the same materials as the
rest of us, except that his ego feeling is without insight, and
his suspicion grows and grows until it reaches the delusion of
persecution. L. was a bright boy, always conceited and given to
non-social acts. Thus he never would play with the other boys
unless he were given the leading role, and he could not bear to
hear others praised or to praise them! Parenthetically the role
that jealousy plays in the conduct of men and women needs
exposition, and I recommend that some Ph. D. merit his degree by
a thesis on this subject. When he was a little older he got the
notion that hats were bad for the hair, and being proud of his
own thick black mop, he went without a hat for over a year,
despite the tears and protestations of his family and the
ridicule of his friends. There is no one so ready to die for a
cause, good or bad, as the paranoid.
He entered the medical school, and to this day there is none of
his classmates who has forgotten him. Proud, even haughty, with
only one or two intimates, he studied hard and did very good
work. Now and then he astonished the class by taking direct issue
with some professor, disputing a theory or a fact with the air of
an authority and proposing some other idea, logically developed
but foolishly based, as if his training were sufficient. It is
characteristic of all paranoid philosophy and schemes that they
despise real experimentation, that they start with some postulate
that has no basis in work done and go on with a minute
hyper-logic that deceives the unsophisticated.
Though L. was "bright," there were better men in his class, and
they received the honors. L. was deeply offended at this and
claimed to his own friends that the professors were down on him,
especially a certain professor of medicine, who, so L. intimated,
was afraid that L.'s theories would displace his own and so was
interested to keep him down. This feeling was intensified when he
came up for the examinations to a certain famous hospital and was
turned down. The real reason for this failure was his
unpopularity with his fellow students, for they let it be known
to the examiners that L. would undoubtedly be hard to get along
with, and it was part of the policy of the hospital to consider
the personality of an applicant as well as his ability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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