Paranoid and defense

Individuals with PPD are uncomfortable with dependency with its implied weakness. They also become quite anxious when coerced by external authority. Their defensive structure requires an ongoing experience of independence, superiority, and autonomy. They seek self-determination and acquire an active fantasy life wherein they create a self-enhanced image and a rewarding existence apart from others.

These individuals actively disown undesirable personal traits and motives by projecting them onto or attributing them to others. Even while people with PPD avoid awareness of their own unattractive behaviors and characteristics, they remain extraordinarily alert to, and hypercritical of, similar features in others.

Individuals with PPD maintain their sense of balance, internal and external, through rigid adherence to an inelastic set of defenses and methods of need gratification. Either extreme or unanticipated stress can precipitate a crisis that appears, to others, out of proportion to the situation at hand.