Word: human
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While justifying the term "paranoid" for collective social actions (such as war) Storr dropped a statistic of heavy import. Notably, that within the period 1920-1945, 59 million beings have been killed in violent acts performed by other more or less "normal" human beings...
...Pursuit of enemies and human cruelty are intimately associated with paranoid projections," proposed Storr. Large number of people are willing to accept the most absurd fantasies about "enemies," delusion beliefs about Jews, negroes, and witches. Most countries have a special "out-group" that receives paranoid projections, such as the "untouchables" of India...
Storr buttressed his argument that latent cruelty exists in most normal individuals by referring to experiments which have shown that normal American college students will apply lethal doses of electric shock to human subjects if they are told to do so by their instructors. He also added that 80 per cent of the pornographic material enjoyed by the general public is sado-masochistic in nature...
Apart his cruelty, man is also unique among the primates for his slow rate of development, which keeps him relatively helpless for almost a quarter of his life. According to Storr, the human infant cannot respond adequately to its environment, resulting in impotent rage and fear. Analysts refer to this earliest stage of emotional childhood as the paranoid-schizoid position...
...Storr, in an interview, said he developed an interest in an innate paranoid state simply because he was curious "as to why human beings treated each other so cruelly." Although he was trained as a psychoanalyst in the school of Carl Jung, he suscribes to theories of Melanie Klein, i.e. that paranoid tendency arises early in infantile development...