Book of the Day:Paranoia - the 21st century fear By Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman Oxford University Press 189pp. £9.99
WE LIVE in a paranoid era where conspiracy theories abound. Consider 9/11, Princess Di and stories about alien abduction. "Our fears," say the authors, "have gotten the better of us, and the twenty-first century begins to look like a new age of paranoia." Written by a clinical psychologist and a self-help author, this book gives a popular account of "everyday" paranoia - the unrealistic belief that other people want to harm us.
Like the word "narcissism", the word paranoia has been overused and its meaning diluted. Traditionally linked to psychosis (schizophrenia), the authors claim that the condition, as familiar as depression, anxiety or common human unhappiness, should be studied in its own right. The mandatory attack on Freud is not long coming, specifically on Freud's claim that in the Schreber case, paranoid delusions are underpinned by a repressed dread of feeling love for a man. Unfortunately for the authors, their own leading example of paranoia - Leontes in A Winters Tale - actually bears out Freud's theory. In any event the book's thesis that paranoia is primary has been pioneered by psychoanalysts, notably Melanie Klein with her paranoid-schizoid position but more especially by Jacques Lacan whose mirror phase is the paranoid basis of personality.
However, the writers are mostly concerned with what we might call "normal" or moderate paranoia which has, it seems, always been with us. It used to be about witches, Jews and Freemasons, but in recent years the media have brought us access to a whole range of new threats: paedophiles, alien abductions and traffic accidents, to mention just a few. Remember the old newspaper adage, "if it bleeds it leads" - and this does not only apply to the tabloids. The paedophilia scare, for example, has encouraged parents to keep children indoors where they acquire a sedentary lifestyle which can lead to obesity. Our anxiety about the threat of child abduction (which probably won't happen) far outweighs fear of obesity (which probably will). It seems that none of us are very good at judging threats for when we are gripped by media-led catastrophes our logic flees. Anxious, we jump to conclusions and seek to verify our new-found preconceptions (it has been remarked that we read, not to change our ideas, but to have them confirmed).
Our leaders who might reassure us are themselves under siege. Hardly a day passes without some doctor being struck off, a politician's lies exposed or the police in the dock. This has led not just to a healthy scepticism about authority but a breakdown in trust. We now expect politicians to lie. In fairness, politicians, hard-pressed by media interviewers, are driven to reveal less and less and retreat into endless cliches.
There is an interesting chapter on psychotic paranoia and "anomalous experiences". These experiences can signal the onset of serious paranoia: noises are heard as louder, there is a feeling that everything is closing in or that things seen out of the corner of the eye loom larger. Continual use of cannabis, too, can trigger pre-psychotic paranoid states in those so predisposed and such people (if they but knew who they were) should not go near the stuff.
Finally, the cure. For psychotic paranoia, psychiatry is all that is on offer but, for mild to moderate conditions, the authors recommend the talking therapies. Their own particular favourite is the fashionable cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT as it is known.
However, the book is not unduly partisan and could benefit any interested reader for it sustains a nice balance between real and imagined threats and underlines that saying of our times: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
• Ross Skelton is senior lecturer in philosophy and psychoanalysis at Trinity College Dublin. His recent Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis won the Choice 2008 award for outstanding academic title