2nd World Congress on Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation & 2nd International Congress on Psychology & Behavioral Sciences
12-13 JUNE 2025 | HYBRID EVENT
Sam Vaknin
The Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies, UK
Paranoia is a mixture of anxiety, hypervigilance, catastrophizing, an internalized bad object, referential ideation, and grandiosity. It involves Anxiety, Splitting, and Misattribution. The world is a hostile and dangerous place: Hypervigilance. I need to be on my guard because I am targeted.
Reactive paranoia: mortification, gaslighting, alloplastic defenses, conspiracism. Catastrophizing: Something really bad is going to happen. Internalized bad object: I am bad or I did something wrong and I deserve to be punished. Guilt often leads to paranoid ideation.
Grandiosity: I am sufficiently important, envied, or interesting to be the target of a malevolent conspiracy with malign intent. Grandiosity can be charismatic - or contemptuous. Charismatic grandiosity is misperceived by others as vision and self-confidence and is attractive. Contemptuous, haughty grandiosity - holding all people in contempt as completely inferior to you - is rejected and hated by people, especially people whose own grandiose or narcissistic defenses are triggered by it. Sometimes paranoid ideation is an outcome of deepset insecurities and social anxiety and referential ideation.
Sam Vaknin , is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction. He is Visiting Professor of Psychology, at Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and a Professor of Finance and Psychology at CIAPS (Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies). He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician and served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, eBookWeb, and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. His YouTube channels garnered 27,000,000 views and 120,000 subscribers.