The paranoid personality type

Who makes up the backbone of the gaming crowd? Which women have no use for compliments (because they do not believe them)? Who forms the core of the feminist movement? Who sees a universal Illuminati conspiracy (of the government, of aliens, …) behind every sneeze?

Well, this is the personality type we are talking about. There are people who are deeply mistrustful, prone to suspicion, looking everywhere for a catch or a plot. And of course they will find the catch and uncover the plot. After all, if you are inclined to a persecution complex, that does not mean nobody is following you. That is exactly why these people are brilliant Investigators (which is what we shall call them). But there is a deep psychic irony here — more on it below.

Have you watched or read Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes? Been taken with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant? Do you like the songs of Viktor Tsoi or the videos of Anzhelika Varum? Do you love films with Milla Jovovich and Ralph Fiennes? Do you watch Alexander Gordon’s talk shows or Yury Dud’s video blogs? And you surely know the President of Russia? Well then, you already know representatives of the paranoid personality type.

The inner world of the paranoid personality type

In terms of the structure of the psyche and the nervous system, the “Investigators” are introverts in the passive position, with the Ego type “Contact with Emotions” and the violated right of “Wanting”

• Introverts — meaning there is no point telling them the truth, they will uncover it themselves
• Passive — meaning they do not need victory at any price. They would sooner be éminences grises. A certain president of a certain country you know, for instance, grabbed a territory while announcing in public: “that wasn’t me, it was either little green men or the will of the people”.
• The Ego type is attraction and aversion, that is, the path of experiencing. The basis: anxious, mistrustful, frightening components and views of the world. What a frightening world to live in!
• The problem violated right is Wanting. Out of the passive life position, these people are dominated by a hyperfunction of the prohibition on realising their ideas and wishes by the direct route. The wish for a cup of tea, for instance, shows up as insistently offering tea to everybody around: “it isn’t me who wants tea, it’s you!”

The basic thing they have is the wish to dig down to the “truth”. All phlegmatic personality types with passive introversion dig for the truth, but paranoids do it in a way of their own. The autistic personality type can simply take facts in and state them without any extra labelling or judgement. The compulsive personality type looks at facts only from the point of view of the system and of society, of how they ought to fit into it. Paranoid types, by contrast, juggle facts and line them up in any sequence or structure that serves their personal overvalued ideas and wishes.

That is, what comes first is not the facts but the idea the facts serve. And to fit facts to ideas, the “Investigators” are equipped with extra-powerful brains. Why?

To solve, paranoid-style, the riddle of the “Investigators’” psyche, you have to combine their Ego type, tuned to emotions, with the violated right, the prohibition on Wanting. It is, after all, very hard to want something emotionally and to forbid yourself that very thing intellectually at the same time.

Since the Ego type of the “Investigators” is Emotions, Paranoid types make most of their moves, choices and decisions on the basis of their GUT FEELINGS, and not on any logical sequence. And here the prohibition on their own feelings kicks in. So afterwards Paranoid types have to explain to themselves that those feelings were in fact logical, systematic and pointing the right way (“these aren’t my wishes, they’re theirs”). For them, feelings have to be highly logical. Imagine the kind of brain it takes to explain your own feelings to yourself.

Hence their hostility to society. Since inner feelings are unpredictable and, because of the prohibition on one’s own wishes, get transferred onto society, the system too turns out to be entirely unpredictable — yet the conclusion will be the required one. So society appears to Paranoid types as an unsafe structure, often holding hidden conspiracies and riddles that it is very important to solve. Exactly like their own inner feelings.

Here is an example going back to Soviet times. A man of the paranoid type formally asked a clinic for help. The clinicians there gave him a very simple assignment: take a camera and photograph the people in the street who, in his view, treated him with suspicion and clearly carried some kind of threat. The client took a camera and went to Red Square — and not on any ordinary day, but on 7 November, to the demonstration, into the crowd. Somewhere around the tenth photograph he was arrested, and his doctors were called in to clarify the circumstances. The client was released, because everything had been properly recorded in his medical file. But why was he arrested? There was not a single stray face in the photographs: every frame showed plain-clothes state security officers. If you have a persecution complex, that does not mean nobody is following you.

The life question of a paranoid person is which of the two gets more attention. At a fork in the road we can always choose the path where there is certain to be danger, or the other one where there is certain to be none. An “Investigator” will choose the path with the danger on it, will foresee that danger well in advance, in order to dodge it at the last moment. And that is precisely what the mega-brain is for.

All that danger, incidentally, wears Paranoid types out, and from time to time they fall into depression. But it is very unlike the depression we usually hear described. The depressive personality type falls into depression with a literal loss of strength: the person runs out of energy altogether, becomes half-dead, drops onto the sofa, face to the wall, eyes fixed on one point, and the whole world doesn’t love me. A Paranoid type entering a similar state freezes completely, switches off from the world, but a different tune plays inside: “the world is hostile, I hate it, and right now I mustn’t move, or they will notice me!” The strength is there, but it is locked, on the contrary, into a compressed spring. At the lowest point the Depressive type has collapsed, powerless; the Paranoid type is a compressed spring.

Harmonious Traits of the paranoid personality type

Paranoid people do know how to use that mega-brain! They are curious, clever, well read, analytical. They can foresee consequences, see connections, build logical chains, find non-obvious ways of solving a problem, and generally do the sums. In short, fully fit for the post of investigator or analyst.

Paranoid types are free of conventions inwardly, and free of the conditions of society outwardly (“internal dissidents” — they live inside the system, but not with it).

In dealings with others this shows up as respect for their own territory and other people’s. They know how to relate to others within the boundaries that have been set, and they treat the inviolability of their own personal sphere and of other people’s with equal respect. Which, by the way, is why they are not very demanding of others either, and do not insist on agreements being kept, along the lines of:

Other strengths of Paranoid types:

1. The ability to see other, non-obvious routes — unconventional thinking, creativity, ways of acting.
2. Calculation (working out the consequences of realising their ideas and wishes, of their actions and so on).
3. Restraint (in expressing their emotions and their thoughts).
4. A wide range of acquaintances and useful connections.
5. The ability to deny themselves excess.
6. A fine sense of style.

Disharmonious, conflict-prone traits of the paranoid personality type

One disharmonious, conflict-prone trait is the uncertainty about whose side they are on in a conflict. Right up to the last moment it is unclear which side a Paranoid type is backing, because in truth they always back their own interests. The main theme is not to expose themselves.

It is very hard for them to say “no” to other people. More than that, a “no” is a form of definiteness, and so Paranoid types are prone to arranging several meetings for the same time, on the same date, in different parts of the city — or better still, of different continents. And you never quite know which of them they will turn up to, because most often they will go to none of them. Paranoid types constantly strive to be unpredictable: “you won’t figure me out, you won’t calculate me, I can barely calculate myself!”

Another thing typical of Paranoid types is squeamishness, which shows up literally everywhere in everyday life. If you pick up their cup, for instance, and take a sip, a paranoid will not finish it. Squeamishness here is a form of protection against danger, and it spills over into the overvalued idea of “influence”, “contamination” and the rest.

Just as with facts, what comes first here is the idea, and the whole of life is arranged around it. “A tidy desk” or “cleanliness”, for instance, mean different things to different Paranoid types, depending on what goes into their idea of “safety”. And here they can be even more compulsive.

The compulsive personality type will do the cleaning or tidy the desk by the rules, the way “people do”, and no further. A paranoid woman may do a deep clean every other day, and one so thorough that not a single microbe survives.

Because Paranoid types pay constant attention to their own personal boundaries, they are focused on defending them against invasion even when nobody is encroaching on their territory at all.

Other conflict-prone traits of Paranoid types:

1. Hypercontrol (of those close to them, of themselves, of their own wishes)
2. Difficulty expressing and even recognising their own emotions (given the prohibition on expressing and realising them). They hold their emotions in.
3. Punishing themselves for realising their own ideas and wishes (they often make promises they cannot keep, for instance, and get told off for it), so that ideas and wishes end up being realised “by a crooked route”.
4. Difficulty saying “no”, turning someone down (better to make an impossible promise and “run away”).
5. The wish to look for a hidden meaning, a secret conspiracy, a threat in everything.
6. “Being chosen”, being out of the ordinary (people are “nasty microbes”, met with aversion and squeamishness).

Appearance of the paranoid personality type

Paranoid features are very clearly expressed at the level of the body. In acute form they are thin, physically gathered in, dried out, very wiry. But the key thing about them is the separateness of the head from the body. Look closely and it seems that the body lives a life of its own and the head a life of its own. It often shows in the set of the neck: a slightly long neck, the head pushed a little forward, like a searchlight.

Very often their eyesight is not very good, or at least it looks that way, because they are always screwing up their eyes a little. That squint is exactly what makes them easy to spot.

The likeness of Kant in the museum in Kaliningrad is a vivid bodily example of the Paranoid type. Kant’s philosophy is just as paranoid: the world is grey, full of riddles that have to be solved, and the world is not particularly well disposed towards me as a person, so I have to resist it somehow.

Paranoid types most often dislike their own body, perceive it as not quite theirs, and treat it with a certain suspicion: the result is not guaranteed, the instrument may prove ineffective. With very rare exceptions, they do not consider themselves beautiful. It is a perfectly normal situation for a paranoid girl to be told by dozens of people that she is beautiful, while she smiles and thanks them with one single thought in her head: “but I know for a fact that you are all lying!” “And what is it you like? Ah, the legs. Hmm, I see — and what about yours?” In other words, the gaze is turned on the people speaking, not on herself.

Paranoid children, incidentally, are more likely than others to get the idea that they were swapped at the maternity hospital. Not in the sense that these are the wrong parents, but that the parents are somehow different, they do not understand, they are on about the wrong things. Harry Potter in the first book is something of an ideal for a paranoid child.

A “spot” may turn up in their make-up. How do you make sure a person does not remember your face? Draw a spot on your nose: then the idiots look at the spot and the polite ones look away — and nobody has remembered your face.

To even out this bodily insecurity they “make” themselves — but not by surgical means; they will not go under the knife. They will work on their own body through fitness, exercise, gymnastics, particular diets, other physical loads. As a result they quite often look very beautiful.

At the same time, the wish to hide socially means the style of clothing is chosen to hide as well — to hide both the person as a whole and particular bodily assets. Paranoid types try to conceal everything a little. It is a perfectly normal situation for a young girl of this personality type to wear jeans, heavy boots and a big long baggy jumper down almost to the knees, so that from the outside you cannot even tell whether it is a girl or a boy. Add a short haircut and light make-up with nothing excessive, and you get a look close to unisex.

Young people with pale faces, dressed against the weather and in the style of “Day Watch”, “vampires”, “the dark side”, are often Paranoid types. Dark tones dominate their clothes, both for invisibility and for practicality. Unlike other personality types, Paranoid types understand practicality not as comfort or convenience, but in terms of efficiency: so that it does not get in the way.

This greyness and darkness is deceptive: inside, Paranoid types are extravagant, exclusive. But you will never find out. They may, for instance, buy themselves a rare pair of shoes for 500 dollars, and there is their happiness. Expensive things are bought precisely for themselves, never put on display: “I know, and that is enough”.

What is more, who in the room could ever guess that you are wearing underwear that costs as much as a new car? That underwear is absolutely exclusive, unrepeatable, and nobody else has anything like it. And nobody will ever see it.

How do you recognise the paranoid personality type by their speech?

Quite easily! Here are some of the phrases we went through above:

• “Enemies all around”, “a universal conspiracy”, “time to hide”.
• “They have made me dirty” (ideas of influence, pollution, contamination, the evil eye, being got at).
• “You will not catch me (you will not calculate me).”

The favourite “toy” of a Paranoid type: “You don’t understand me!”

You will also recognise them by their air of mystery, their dreaminess, their life in a world of mysterious ideas. Paranoid types live in their own invented world of the “Night Watch and Day Watch”, of Tolkien, of “we are vampires”, “elves and orcs”, of goths. And there are a great many of them among gamers.

The same goes for the occult, a love of numerology, astrology and Kabbalah. The “scary” occult — the sort where you walk in circles around a table with a sacrifice on it — is the province of others, of Epileptoid personality types. For Paranoid types the occult is a mysterious divinity, of the Kabbalah kind.

There is a great divine book, the Torah, on the basis of which the Bible appeared. Kabbalists discovered that if you take from the text of the Torah the first letter of the first word of every chapter and write them out as a single word, you get a completely coherent text that makes sense. What is more, there are four further ways of reading the Torah through other mathematical constructions. Studying all of that — those books, those features, those numerical dependencies — is what Kabbalah does. And Kabbalah began as a test of whether the Torah really is a divine book: if it is from God, it must contain further layers. There you have a description of the paranoid worldview!