delusional systems

Maybe it's a form of Stockholm syndrome -- but in this case, let's call it Weimar syndrome. To put it another way: I'll see your portrait of Leo Strauss... ...and raise you two book covers by Sander Gilman: Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence, and Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Don't mind me. I'm just thinking out loud here. But while I'm at it, why not note my recent musings about the possible relationship between pathological narcissism and clinical paranoia? The latter needn't be restricted to imagined persecution. The DSM-IV lists "ideas of reference" among the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder: This form of thought disorder is characterized by a delusional belief that media content, e.g. television or radio broadcast, refers to oneself, or that others are talking or thinking about oneself. Although what I was thinking is related to this, I guess I was thinking more about the suspicion that there are profound secret messages encoded in books -- or in the structure of reality itself -- just waiting to be discovered by an elite inner sanctum of esoteric adepts. Leo Strauss seems to have believed something like this -- along with all other types of "spiritual" occultists. the "face" on Mars, 1976 the same area shot at extremely high resolution in 2001

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