Psychotic grandiosity

ALTHOUGH PSYCHOTIC GRANDIOSITY, like delusions of persecution, constitutes a major symptom in paranoid psychoses, it has not aroused investigative attention. Surprisingly little has been added to our understanding of psychotic grandiosity in the past 50 years, and our knowledge of it has not advanced appreciably beyond the early descriptions provided by Bleuler, Kraepelin, Freud, and others. It is indicative of this lack of interest that Psychological Abstracts does not have a heading for grandiosity, and that no articles under the heading megalomania have appeared in the past five years. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to reexamine the phenomenology of psychotic grandiosity in order to ascertain its incidence, delineate the various forms it might take, and discover some underlying causal factors. Toward this end, I shall present empirical data gathered from 100 patients at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute diagnosed during 1968-1971 as having some form of paranoid psychosis.