The Paranoid Pseudo-Community Revisited

The pseudo-community is reformulated as a cognitive structure which attempts to solve the problem of reconciling social reality with the products of paranoid projection. Delusional development follows regresion and the loss of social reality. It begins with the estrangement experienced by a partially regressed person when he attempts to regain object relations and proceeds through successive provisional reconstructions of reality until a cognitive solution is reached which seems to justify paranoid action. Aggressive action is likely to make social reality confirm the expectations of the pseudo-community.