People of the paranoid personality type are masters at unravelling secrets and conspiracies. Every personality type picks the careers that let it satisfy its neurotic needs in a socially adaptive way, and that is what gives a person the chance to get on with the main thing. Let us recall what the central problem of the paranoid psyche is:
- Because of the violated right to want under the Ego type “Contact with Emotions”, they deny that their own desires, motivations and sensations exist at all
- But since the desires do exist, they give them a logical justification, attributing them to a supreme idea and to society (“It is not me who wants this, it is you”)
- And since the desires (attributed to society) do surface after all, and surface in the “blind avoided zone” at that — meaning they are unpredictable and uncontrollable — society is likewise experienced as dangerous and complicated, as something that has to be worked out.
This is how brilliant investigators, analysts, theoretical scientists, architects and designers come about. Keepers of great secrets, too: Tibetan Buddhists, intelligence officers, scientists in classified institutes.
For an illustration, the main character of the film “The Darwin Awards” is a hundred-per-cent paranoid. He is an insurance company investigator who looks into every case and proves that it is not a claimable event. He digs up every fact, arranges the facts into a sequence and reconstructs the events from them, however unpredictable those events may have been. And he is able to reconstruct what really happened. Why do paranoids make good investigators? Because for them the main thing is to get to the truth.
They are also freelancers, the “I work for myself” people, because they feel the system is holding them back.
Paranoids grow into designers — exclusive, unconventional and creative. Creativity in all its forms is native to them, but from the angle of development, of thinking through chains and schemes. Pure creativity as such belongs to another personality type, the schizoid.
Paranoids make excellent politicians. And it suits them better to be committed oppositionists, representatives of the eternal opposition (after all, they need somebody to fight!)
And there is one more: assistant to a lawyer, since a paranoid will not go out and speak in public. He is more of an éminence grise, weaving networks of influence.
And also:
- Journalists investigating conspiracies.
- Intelligence and counter-intelligence officers.
- Analysts and theoretical scientists.
