r/Schizoid

For context, here are some excerpts from her work on schizoid personality organization. Reading her feels profoundly poignant and incredibly accurate . Curious to hear from others

The detachment of the schizoid person represents, among other things, the defensive strategy of withdrawal from overstimulation, traumatic impingement, and invalidation, and most experienced psychoanalytic clinicians know not to take it at face value, however severe and off-putting it may appear. The psychoanalytic use of the term schizoid derives from the observations of “schisms” between the internal life and the externally observable life of the schizoid individual (cf. Laing, 1965). For example, schizoid people are overtly detached, yet they describe in therapy a deep longing for closeness and compelling fantasies of intimate involvement. They appear self-sufficient, and yet anyone who gets to know them well can attest to the depth of their emotional need. They can be absent-minded at the same time that they are acutely vigilant. They may seem completely nonreactive, yet suffer an exquisite level of sensitivity. They may look affectively blunted while internally coping with what one of my schizoid friends calls “protoaffect,” the experience of being frighteningly overpowered by intense emotion. They may seem utterly indifferent to sex while nourishing a sexually preoccupied, polymorphously elaborated fantasy life. They may strike others as unusually gentle souls, but an intimate may learn that they nourish elaborate fantasies of world destruction. The term may also have been influenced by the fact that the characteristic anxieties of schizoid people concern fragmentation, diffusion, going to pieces. They feel all too vulnerable to uncontrollable schisms in the self. Having been originally trained in an ego psychology model, I have found it useful to think of the schizoid personality as defined by a fundamental and habitual reliance on the defense mechanism of withdrawal. This withdrawal can be more or less geographical, as in the case of a man who retreats to his den or to some remote location whenever the world is too much for him, or internal, as illustrated by a woman who goes through the motions of being present while attending mostly to internal fantasies and preoccupations. Theorists in the object relations movement emphasized the presence in schizoid people of a core conflict with interpersonal closeness versus distance, a conflict in which physical (not internal) distance usually wins out (Fairbairn, 1940. In more severely disturbed schizoid people, withdrawal can look like an unremitting state of psychological inaccessibility, whereas in those who are healthier, there is a noticeable oscillation between connection and disconnection. Guntrip coined the phrase “in and out programme” to describe the schizoid pattern of seeking intense affective connection followed by having to distance and re-collect the sense of self that is threatened by such intensity. Non-schizoid people, among whom are presumably the authors of the DSM and many others in the descriptive psychiatric tradition, often conclude that because schizoid individuals resolve their closeness/distance conflicts in the direction of distance and seem to thrive on being alone, they are not particularly attached and therefore are not reactive to separation. Yet internally, schizoid people may have powerful attachments. In fact, those that they have may be more intensely invested with emotion than are the attachments of people with much more obviously “anaclitic” psychologies. Because schizoid individuals tend to feel safe with comparatively few others, any threat to or loss of their connection with the people with whom they do feel comfortable can be devastating. If there are only three individuals by whom one feels truly known, and one of these is lost, then one-third of one’s support system has vanished. The fact that schizoid people repeatedly detach and seek solitude is not evidence of their being immune to loneliness, any moreperson’s avoidance of affect means that he or she is indifferent to strong emotion.