SHARED PSYCHOSIS
by Richard Koenigsberg

SHARED PSYCHOSIS: Lee Harris: “What happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation?

  1. Leaders put forth psychotic fantasies and these come to DEFINE OR CONSTRUCT ORDINARY SOCIAL REALITY, thus rendering the people who share or embrace these fantasies no longer psychotic. The thought patterns of leaders are often psychotic, but the people who embrace these patterns of thought are not psychotic because—because members of society share their psychotic fantasies. Shared psychotic fantasy is not separate from ordinary reality.
  2. Shared fantasies produce psychic pathologies which, however, are not recognized as psychopathology because everyone shares or buys into them. The fantasies that define politics are contained within ORDINARY STRUCTURES OF CULTURE. We shy away from conceiving of the normal historical process as a vast arena in which extraordinary forms of psychopathology occur. Since everyone is tied into certain shared,  paranoid, psychotic fantasies, it’s not easy to analyze them.
  3. “ORDINARY” FORMS OF REALITY MAY GROW OUT OF PSYCHOTIC BELIEF SYSTEMS: Reality is constructed based on shared fantasy. The fact that a fantasy is shared leads us to believe that what is occurring is NOT psychotic, even though the results are monumentally destructive and self-destructive. The Nazis were suffering from a paranoid psychosis. However, when many persons in a society share and embrace a particular idea, we no longer call it psychosis. We have not developed a way of conceptualizing psychotic ideas that are shared by many members of a society.
  4. One might say that the Nazis were suffering from a paranoid psychosis. However, when many persons in a society share and embrace a particular idea, we no longer call it a psychosis. Really, we have not yet developed a way of conceptualizing psychotic ideas that are shared by many members of a society.
  5. We have difficulty imagining that an entire social movement or culture grew out of—was built upon—a fundamentally psychotic idea.