Ideas of reference and delusions of reference

Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the phenomenon of an individual experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance. It is "the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny", usually in a negative and hostile manner.

In psychiatry, delusions of reference form part of the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder, bipolar disorder (during the elevated stages of mania), narcissistic personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder, and even autism when under periods of intense stress. To a lesser extent, it can be a hallmark of paranoid personality disorder as well as body dysmorphic disorder. Such symptoms can also be caused by intoxication, such as from stimulants like methamphetamine.

Psychoanalytic views

In Sigmund Freud's view, "Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis...voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the nowiki/>paranoid.html" ;"title="paranoid.html" ;"title="nowiki/>paranoid">nowiki/>paranoid">paranoid.html" ;"title="nowiki/>paranoid">nowiki/>paranoiddisease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively." As early as 1928, Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung, introduced the concept of synchronicity, a theory of "meaningful coincidences".

In 1946, Otto Fenichel concluded that "the projection of the superego is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being influenced....Delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscience actually tells him."

Jacques Lacan similarly saw ideas of reference as linked to "the unbalancing of the relation to the capital Other and the radical anomaly that it involves, qualified, improperly, but not without some approximation to the truth, in old clinical medicine, as partial delusion"—the "big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words", in short, the realm of the superego.

Anti-psychiatry

Validation rather than clinical condemnation of ideas of reference is frequently expressed by anti-psychiatrists, on the grounds, for example, that "the patient's ideas of reference and influence and delusions of persecution were merely descriptions of her parents' behavior toward her." While accepting that "there is certainly confusion between persecutory fantasies and persecutory realities", figures like David Cooper believe that "ideas of connection with apparently remote people, or ideas of being influenced by others equally remote, are in fact stating their experience" of social influence – albeit in a distorted form by "including in their network of influence institutions as absurd as Scotland Yard, the Queen of England, the President of the United States, or the BBC
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