Borderline (Psychology Revivals)

A Psychological Study of Paranoia and Delusional Thinking

Peter Chadwick

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415724807
• eBook ISBN: 9781317932413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1992, Borderline presents a unique study of the disturbed mind. Professional psychologist Peter Chadwick draws upon his own personal experience of madness to provide a valuable exploration of the psychology of paranoia and schizophrenia.

The book goes beyond a narrowly focused analytical approach to examine schizophrenia from as many perspectives as possible. Using participant observation, introspection, case study and experimental methods, Chadwick shows how paranoid and delusional thinking are only exaggerations of processes to be found in normal cognition. Impressed by the similarities between the thinking of mystics and psychotics, he argues that some forms of madness are closely related to profound mystical experience and intuition, but that these are expressed in a distorted form in the psychotic mind. He explores the many positive characteristics and capabilities of paranoid patients, providing a sympathetic account which balances the heavily negative constructions usually put on paranoia in the research literature.

Borderline provides many novel insights into madness and raises important questions as to how psychosis and psychotics are to be evaluated. It will be essential reading for all practising professionals and students in clinical psychology and psychiatry, and for everyone involved in the treatment, understanding and management of schizophrenia.

1

Introduction

Thinking in science, sex and madness

From Rocks to Psychotics

Psychology is my second career, but my interest in it has – via a long and winding path – in part developed from my first. When I tell the readers that my previous research area was in structural geology and rock mechanics (e.g. Chadwick 1971,1976a), while this research is, of course, on paranoia and delusional thinking, they will no doubt be astonished that there could be any connection at all between the two. To explicate the full history of how my previous research identity metamorphosed into my present one would take too long but some brief comments may be useful as they highlight the early hunches on which this investigation was partly based.

My work on rock deformation was not only of a theoretical and experimental nature but was also observational. During my field research I realized that there were many biases and illusions in perception and thought that could distort a geologist’s reports and lead to false inferences and interpretations. This insight led me to develop a research domain, which I referred to as ‘geological psychology’ – the psychological study of geological work. After early investigations on judgement and attentional biases (Chadwick 1971, 1972, 1975a, b), and on visual illusions in geology and related disciplines (Chadwick 1976b, 1977a, b, 1981,1982), I began work on the interrelationships between memory and aesthetic judgement (Chadwick and Hughes 1980), the education of interpretation and thinking (Chadwick 1978a, b) and then, critically, on distortional influences on thought itself. One early road from this research connected with mainstream geology (Chadwick 1976a, 1977c) and one, eventually, to perception psychology (Chadwick 1983) but the work on thought was the road that led me into the territory of my current research. One particular problem in cognitive psychology captivated me: ‘confirmation bias’ (Wason 1960; Wason and Johnson-Laird 1968; Mynatt et al. 1977; Tweney et al. 1981). This is the bias to select and accept data that confirm one’s ideas and hypotheses at the expense of data that refute them, obviously a very common and pervasive phenomenon! It seemed to me that confirmation bias and high creativity often went together. Eysenck (1981:2) even suggests that in the early stages of the development of a paradigm we not only do but should preferentially seek confirmation – an idea I had often played with. Only in this way, I thought, can we elaborate something from the quivering vulnerable status of a hunch to that of an edifice to be challenged and metamorphosed into something more mature and of more general explanatory power. I speculated that even good ideas would die young if our cognitive processes were designed so as to be dominated by refutation bias.

The popularity of Popperian falsification ideas (Popper 1959, 1963) in the 1970s therefore greatly troubled me. I battled with the literature on the philosophy of science and concluded that confirmation bias is a double-sided coin. The positive side attracted me at the time. On this side is persistence, steadiness of feeling and judgement, courage to stick with an idea to see how far it will go, faith and confidence in one’s own decisions and a moral sense that one should stand by one’s convictions. With hindsight we may see that we were wrong, but in the foresight situation our amount of information is less, and limited. On the starting grid, it seemed to me, the successful and the unsuccessful scientist might not be so very different. This attitude was never completely submerged and, as we shall see, very nearly led to my own destruction.

Between 1972 and 1981 my interest in geological matters was gradually eclipsed by those of a psychological nature; I moved away from geological psychology into the field of personality and abnormal psychology. As a counsellor, between 1978 and 1981, I became impressed also by the negative side of the coin of confirmation bias: its role in psychological disorders. As is well known, paranoid individuals hold onto ideas very tenaciously, resist argument against them and select and distort input so as to confirm their paranoid ideation. They are also, and thus, very creative in the sphere of elaborating their delusional constructs. These people seemed to me to be almost personifications of confirmation bias and bore out the ideas of Bennett (1964) and Toulmin (1972) that rationality and irrationality should not only be assessed on the content of a belief but on the manner in which the belief is held. It therefore seemed worthwhile to investigate this phenomenon so as to give continuity to my research and, perhaps, to make a small contribution to the understanding of the puzzling phenomenon of delusional thinking.

As the readers will have noticed, in the mid-1970s I worked on visual illusions in perception, mainly in the context of scientific research. Just as the phenomenon of confirmation bias might, I thought, be relevant to the understanding of paranoia, so it seemed that some of the principles I had obtained from my study of illusions might equally be relevant to the understanding of delusions. Illusions represent the results of processes which, with certain stimulus configurations or in impoverished viewing conditions, can lead us astray, but usually these processes give us a good anchoring in the world at a certain level of description. Delusions, so I speculated, might also represent the results of processes which usually enable us to make sense out of the world and to predict accurately. They might even lead to valuable creative insights, but under certain conditions, such as impoverished external input, they might lead us into self-defeating, chaotic or confused behaviour. This seemed a useful angle to pursue.

In my counselling work I met a wide range of people but they happened to fall mostly into two main categories: those with sexual or gender identity problems (homosexuals, fetishists, transvestites, transsexuals and masochists) and recovering psychotic clients. Apart from the oft-encountered confirmation bias it also seemed to me that there were other connections and similarities in the mentation of these two very broad classes of people. Of course, Freud (1911) had previously suggested a connection between paranoia and unconscious homosexuality, but this now seems to have been largely misguided (see, for example, Hastings 1941; Rosenfeld 1949; Klein and Horwitz 1949; Thornton 1948). One very unfortunate masochist, for example, said to me that he had eventually reached the stage where he wanted his ‘madame’ to control everything he did, the clothes he wore, the records he listened to, the cereals he ate. This total control is a sexual experience for the submissive, yet such a longed-for situation is what some paranoids actually do believe is happening to them – via the medium of computers or hypnotic suggestion at-a-distance. The possibility thus presented itself that the whole of the paranoid psychotic episode may well be suffused through with a non-overt sexual masochism or involve disinhibition of masochistic tendencies. Such disinhibition has actually been suggested by Arieti (1974).

Some of the delusional systems which my clients articulated to me were also of great interest in their own right. If only they had written them out as a story for publication they would in some instances have made good novels or films. Alas they lived them, believed them totally and in some cases were very nearly destroyed by them. Nevertheless, there was clear evidence of talent in these people, perhaps displaced and unappreciated, but there. Having come from research in the psychology of scientists I was therefore more impressed by the similarities than the differences between scientists and deluded psychotics in their creativity and style of thinking. Table 1.1 explicates this comparison between the two groups. My first impression was that scientists were creative people who were judged as ‘right’; the psychotics I dealt with were creative people who were judged as ‘wrong’. The label ‘psychotic’ was perhaps socially referenced rather than brain referenced.

Table 1.1 Similarities and differences between thinking in delusion and in science

Delusional thinking	Scientific thinking
Thought is often distressing.	Thought not usually distressing but certainly can be if conflicts greatly with orthodoxy, e.g. Darwin, Galileo, Jung.
Style of thinking tends to distance person from all others.	Style of thinking does tend to distance scientist from family and friends, but not colleagues.
Preoccupation with coincidences.	Preoccupation with causality.
Evidence on which thought is based seems slender.	Evidence on which thought is based seems quite substantial.
Thought often (but not always) held with complete certainty, a sense of utter and complete conviction.	Thought often (but not always) held with complete certainty, a sense of utter and complete conviction.
Thought very preoccupying.	Thought very preoccupying.
Thought characterized by hasty speculation followed by tenaciously hanging onto hypothesis.	Thought characterized by hasty speculation followed by tenaciously hanging onto hypothesis.
Thought associated with quite basic emotions such as high anger, high fear and/or eroticism.	Thought associated with more subtle emotions such as wonder at the harmony of nature, but attitude to research is usually high on aggression.
Thought often, but not always, seems implausible and unlikely.	Thought usually seems plausible and even when unusual, colleagues feel person ‘may have a point’.
Person cannot usually (but sometimes can) be argued out of belief.	Person can hardly ever be argued out of belief but can be affected by new data.
Feelings of grandiosity sometimes to often accompany thought.	Feelings of grandiosity occasionally to sometimes accompany thought.
Delusions give order to person’s life.	Person’s theory gives order to his or her data and sometimes also to his or her life.
Person’s delusions attach him or her to the world.	Person’s theory attaches that individual to the world.
Person has little capacity to be objective about his or her thoughts.	Person has considerable capacity to be objective about his or her theory.
Person often not willing to talk about thought.	Person usually (but not always) willing to talk about thought.
Talking about thought often causes considerable emotion to be expressed.	Talking about thought often causes considerable emotion to be expressed.
Person gets angry with people who do not accept the validity of his or her thought/system.	Person gets angry with people who do not accept the validity of his or her thought/system.
Thinking sometimes sounds like that of a mystic.	Thinking sometimes sounds like that of a mystic.
The delusion promotes a vigilant search for evidence and ideas that confirm it.	The hypothesis promotes a vigilant search for evidence and ideas that confirm it.
Person tends to regard disconfirmatory evidence as invalid, e.g. ‘You’re lying to me’ or ‘You don’t understand me’.	Person sometimes regards disconfirmatory evidence as invalid, e.g. ‘Your experiment was badly controlled/conceived’, ‘Just an isolated instance’ or ‘You don’t understand my theory’.
Evidential basis can collapse yet the conceptual structure of the belief may remain in place.	If evidential basis collapses the theory, at least eventually, also collapses.

The readers will by now be getting some idea of ‘where we are coming from’. My academic training at university level was in psychology, geology, physics/mechanics, physiology and mathematics; my applied work was, as we have seen, in helping people with sexual variations, gender identity disorders and psychoses. Clearly my background is very different to that of most researchers in personality, psychiatry and abnormal psychology and this book will reflect that. When I tell the readers also that I was at first destined at school to be a historian, they will see that the present approach will attack the phenomenon of paranoia and delusional thinking in a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted and rather different way to those previously articulated.

The Contextual Approach

Before we at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Thinking in Science, Sex and Madness
• 2. An Introduction to the Case Studies and the Case of David B: ‘Erratica and Erotica’
• 3. Shafiq: ‘The Greatest Man in the World?’
• 4. Mysticism, Delusion and the Paranormal
• 5. The Route to Hell and Back
• 6. Alana J: ‘I’m Dancing as Fast as I Must’
• 7. Chris: ‘Out of this World’
• 8. Alison: ‘I’m Waiting’
• 9. Overview and Reflections on the Case Studies
• 10. The Experimental Study: The Theories and how they were Tested
• 11. The Experimental Study: Results and Analyses
• 12. Implications for Therapy
• 13. Conclusions and General Discussion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index