A comprehensive history and analysis of the origins, evolution, and current life, legacy, and impact of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to today. Conspiracies have been woven through America’s social tapestry since the beginning of its history. The United States of Paranoia is a unique and fascinating look at how these commonly held beliefs—true or not—have helped shape the American cultural imagination. Using examples from colonial times to today, Jesse Walker makes the compelling argument that paranoia doesn’t just exist on the fringe of society, but is at the core of our national identity. Walker doesn’t focus on proving or disproving a particular theory. Synthesizing intensive archival research in a pulp fiction narrative, he explores the myths that haunt our nation, breaking them into five distinct categories: The Enemy Outside, The Enemy Within, The Enemy Above, The Enemy Below, and The Benevolent Conspiracy. From J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to Watergate, the “Matrix” phenomenon to the Birthers, Walker reveals how national myths have influenced our lives, including our view of ourselves and our government. He also identifies and explores the little-recognized rise of a subculture obsessed not with one single myth or another, but in the notion of the conspiracy phenomenon itself. This growing obsession, Walker attests, offers profound insight into what it means to be American. Provocative, well-reasoned, and utterly compelling, the United States of Paranoia will make you rethink the world and the nation in a new and different way.

Attachment Theory and Psychosis: Current Perspectives and Future Directions is the first book to provide a practical guide to using attachment theory in the assessment, formulation and treatment of a range of psychological problems that can arise as a result of experiencing psychosis. Katherine Berry, Sandra Bucci and Adam N. Danquah, along with an international selection of contributors, expertly explore how attachment theory can inform theoretical understanding of the development of psychosis, psychological therapy and mental health practice with service users with psychosis. In the first section of the book, contributors describe the application of attachment theory to the understanding of paranoia, voice-hearing, negative symptoms, and relationship difficulties in psychosis. In the second section of the book, the contributors consider different approaches to working therapeutically with psychosis and demonstrate how these approaches draw on the key principles of attachment theory. In the final section, contributors address individual and wider organisation perspectives, including a voice-hearer perspective on formulating the relationship between voices and life history, how attachment principles can be used to organise the provision of mental health services, and the influence of mental health workers’ own attachment experiences on therapeutic work. The book ends by summarising current perspectives and highlighting future directions. Written by leading mental health practitioners and researchers, covering a diverse range of professional backgrounds, topics and theroetical schools, this book is significant in guiding clinicians, managers and commissioners in how attachment theory can inform everyday practice. Attachment Theory and Psychosis: Current Perspectives and Future Directions will be an invaluable resource for mental health professionals, especially psychologists and other clinicians focusing on humanistic treatments, as well as postgraduate students training in these areas.

Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

My Paranoid Theory is a story that mixes fiction with real incidents to create a new sci-fi reality. Its a story that merges illusions, dreams, nightmares, facts, and other relative realities. All the stories are based on real events. Paranoia and schizophrenia might have contributed in shaping these stories. Who am I to judge? Since time is relative, this book can open your eyes to some old myths, religions or faiths, future sci-fi technologies, and present theories.

Originally published in 1980, Cognition in Schizophrenia and Paranoia presents a theoretical framework that relates three fields of psychology: the experimental research in psychopathology, the developmental literature on intellectual growth, and the literature on hemispheric specialization. The specifications of the separate processes and their integration provides the means to reanalyze our empirical operations and theoretical terms in order to provide a more complete level of understanding, or at least alert us to additional possibilities in research strategies. Today it can be read in its historical context.

PARANOIA JOSEPH FINDER Adam Cassidy is twenty-six and a low level employee at a high-tech corporation who hates his job. When he manipulates the system to do something nice for a friend, he finds himself charged with a crime. Corporate Security gives him a choice: prison - or become a spy in the headquarters of their chief competitor, Trion Systems. They train him. They feed him inside information. Now, at Trion, he's a star, skyrocketing to the top. He finds he has talents he never knew he possessed. He's rich, drives a Porsche, lives in a fabulous apartment, and works directly for the CEO. He's dating the girl of his dreams. His life is perfect. And all he has to do to keep it that way is betray everyone he cares about and everything he believes in. But when he tries to break off from his controllers, he finds he's in way over his head, trapped in a world in which nothing is as it seems and no one can really be trusted. And then the real nightmare begins... From the writer whose novels have been called "thrilling" (New York Times) and "dazzling" (USA Today) comes an electrifying new novel, a roller-coaster ride of suspense that will hold the reader hostage until the final, astonishing twist. Now a major motion-picture starring, Harrison Ford, Liam Hemsworth and Gary Oldman.