Nick Piombino's incisive and brilliant essay on paranoia has been translated into Spanish. The case Nick makes is quite convincing; I am happy to call the style of the current occupant of the White House "paranoid." I do have a few questions, though. When we use terms that refer to individual psyches and apply these terms to entire cultures or parts of cultures, what exactly are we doing? Is this a metonymy: society is dominated by those suffering from paranoia, or a metaphor: the culture acts as though it were a paranoid individual? Or is it some combination of the two?

If paranoia is caused by some chemical imbalance of the brain, how can the culture itself be paranoid? The culture does not have a brain in the sense that an individual does.

(Aside: I have no problem using the word "phobia" to describe those who have a pathological thought about the sexual orientation of Sponge Bob or Buster Baxter or Winnie the Pooh. But is this the same sort of "phobia" that we associate with people who cannot stand to be in elevators or see spiders? Are these psychological pathologies of the body politic located in individual brains, or are we using these terms metaphorically? If "homophobia" is similar to arachnophobia, should we simply see it as a mental health issue, without blaming those who suffer from this ailment? We could give anti-anxiety drugs to James Dobson)

How exactly, does the mental pathology make the jump to the level of culture? What is the mechanism? Is it when X number of powerful people succumb to the mental illness in question?

How fair is this to mentally ill people, to use their ailments as metaphors for everything that is wrong with the world? Isn't it more frightening that seemingly sane individuals, who would probably not have any malfunction of the brain, are paranoid in this cultural sense?

Finally, does the Piombino analysis, which rings true enough, depend on (largely discredited) Freudian ideas about the etiology of mental disease? If I accept Nick's analysis as valid (which I would like to do), am I also buying into a Freudian scheme? Do we still want to use Freudian concepts for cultural critique even when they no longer apply in the strict sense to the individual psyche? To what degree does our easy acceptance of these ideas depend on an atmosphere of uncritical cultural "Freudianism"?