I have been observing my own paranoid
thought-patterns for months now and I think I should share what I think about it. I don't believe that paranoia is actually a delusion, but a kind of mechanism that makes it possible for a person to observe his and others'
unconscious.
What are the actual delusions in paranoia? First, paranoid person experiences that he is the center of the reality and everything around him is happening because and for him. But if we think about this we can't say that it's really a delusion. After all, we ARE the center of our reality, for it is our mind only that constructs what we call "reality". And by our current knowledge of the universe we can't call any other point the "center" than our own subjective experience. Experiencing world as such cannot be called a delusion by any means. If we know anything about how our senses receive information it is also true that everything we perceive IS pointed at ourselves. That also cannot be called a delusion.
This is, of course, quite basic knowledge. What is the root of paranoia is the way how the person merges a continuum of meanings to his observation. He views the world as an act whose whole purpose is to make him understand some hidden truth, so he actually interprets the whole reality like it were a work of art. This, of course, cannot be called delusion too.
What we can say now is that the pattern he is observing is his own unconscious. He is actually becoming aware of how he projects his own mind into whatever he observes and how it all changes and manipulates him. His life has become a great story and he is the main charecter, but he are unaware of that by himself and that frightens him, for all fear has roots in the unknown. He tries to escape this truth, his own subconscious, because of his low self-esteem and projects his lack of trust in himself to his observations, being sure that THEY are hiding the fact from him, the key to live his own life as he wills, while actually he IS living as he really wants, as the ultimate center of attention and the savior who is seeing the truth. And who has the right to say that this is wrong and delusion?
The real problem is his low self-esteem. He still fears his own unconscious and actually doesn't want to take himself in control, so he tries to prove that he is still controlled by society and everything that has been manipulating him unconsciously, while actually the freedom is in front of him. He fails to see that human culture isn't constructed consciously and that we are all part of it and it is part of us. And while he looks for more proof he finds how complicated our culture is and how subtle ways we gather information and ways of thinking. And he thinks that it is all organized consciously to control him.
While the truth is that it's a collective construction and he is part of it, or even IT, becoming self-conscious by dissolving the unconscious.