Ideas of Reference

Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the phenomenon of an individual's 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."

In psychiatry, delusions of reference form part of the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia,delusional disorder, or bipolar disorder (during the elevated stages of mania). To a lesser extent, it can be a hallmark of paranoid personality disorder. Such symptoms can also be caused by intoxication, especially with hallucinogens or stimulants like methamphetamine.

Sigmund Freud considered that ideas of reference illuminated the concept of the superego: '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 [paranoid] disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively'.

In his wake, 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'.

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.

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