The British historian Richard J. Evans published Hitler and conspiracy theories: the Third Reich and the paranoid imagination (Crítica, 2021) , a unique work in which he analyzes various episodes surrounded by conspiratorial interpretations and a dense climate of political paranoia. . They marked in one way or another the history of the Third Reich. But what scope can we give to the expression "political paranoia"? The Dictionary of Psychoanalysis by Élisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon informs us that paranoia was introduced as a psychology term in the 19th century by German specialists and constituted, for them, one of the three forms of psychosis.
It was characterized as "a systematized delusion, the predominance of interpretation and the absence of intellectual deterioration." Melanie Klein later brought it closer to schizophrenia south africa phone number list and, before her, in 1911, Sigmund Freud considered it "a defense against homosexuality" and compared it to a philosophy due to its internal argument consistency and its closeness to "normal" reasoning. This systematicity, the dictionary clarifies, was what later fascinated Jacques Lacan and led him to erect paranoia as a model of madness and to devote his thesis on medicine to it.
Significant fact, the Freudian princeps case on the subject is constituted by the book of an individual who did not treat, Memoirs of a Nervous Patient by Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), a German jurist who attempted suicide after his unsuccessful candidacy for the Reichstag. The outbreak of his illness appeared linked to a political episode. Without abandoning the political plane, but trying an approach from literary criticism, Ricardo Piglia explored the links of fiction with the plot, one of the lucubrations associated with paranoia. In a conference that he gave in Buenos Aires in 2001, a few months after the greatest social crisis that Argentina suffered and before a group of artists precisely "sworn" to resist the desolation that was being experienced, he explained the reasons that lead certain people to imagine the conspiracy of great powers against him.