In his books, The Paranoid Process (1978) and Psychotherapy for the Paranoid process (1986), William W. Meissner noted the correlation of depression and paranoia. Paranoia or sense of false
importance and power, he said, is a mask over underlying sense of inferiority and inadequacy.
The paranoid person feels excruciatingly inadequate and fears death; he refused to accept that reality, for if he did he would be depressed.
Instead, he denied his depression, at least, at the conscious mind level and places his spurious sense of superiority over other people in his conscious mind.
In this light, many Igbos feel totally inferior and inadequate and deny it at the level and instead place in their conscious minds their false sense of superiority to other African tribes. They are always comparing themselves to other tribes and to the extent that they think that they approximate white man’s indices of civilization (such as go to school, obtain degrees etc.) they boast about it. They constantly tell people that they are a superior people.
The white man sees Africans as inferior people and instead of fighting him Igbos tells their fellow Africans that the white man sees them as the smartest Africans! Why? It is because the white man admits a few of them to his top universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, UCLA, Oxford and Cambridge.
