The paranoiac reduces all reality to his own fixed self-image

Evidence

In spite of her superficial arrogance, the narcissistic woman knows she is threatened; it is why she is uneasy, susceptible, irritable, and constantly suspicious; her vanity is never satisfied; the older she grows, the more anxiously she seeks praise and success, the more she suspects plots around her; lost and obsessed, she sinks into the darkness of bad faith and often ends up by building a paranoid delirium around herself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1834 (#expands, via linked claim)

Since the shadow, like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague), is a remainder par excellence, something that can “fall” from the body, just like hair, excrement, or nail clippings to which it “is” compared in all archaic magic. But they are also, one knows, “metaphors” of the soul, of breath, of Being, of essence, of what profoundly gives meaning to the subject. Without an image or without a shadow, the body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder. It is the diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. There is no more reality: it is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague, the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero - classic sequence of fantastic tales - see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 489 (#expands, via linked claim)

The noise was immense. It was gut-pounding. It smacked the cosmos. Without thinking I clamped the flat of my palms to both ears and screwed my face into the scrunched expression of a root-canal patient. I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms. Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing. — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 32 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The shadow, like the mirror image, carries away all reality from the body. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 489; Extreme urban noise can override a person’s own self-image and defenses — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute…, 32; Half-education reduces thought to commodity facts, defeating self-examination against paranoia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The narcissist’s vanity grows more anxious and paranoid with age #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1834
• The shadow, like the mirror image, carries away all reality from the body. #expands (0.78) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 489
• Extreme urban noise can override a person’s own self-image and defenses #complicates (0.75) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 32
• Half-education reduces thought to commodity facts, defeating self-examination against paranoia #qualifies (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 157