Guntrip's analysis
Ralph Klein, Clinical Director of the Masterson Institute delineates the following nine characteristics of the schizoid personality as described by Harry Guntrip: introversion, withdrawnness, narcissism, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalization, and regression.
Introversion
According to Guntrip, "By the very meaning of the term the schizoid is described as cut off from the world of outer reality in an emotional sense. All this libidinal desire and striving is directed inward toward internal objects and he lives an intense inner life often revealed in an astonishing wealth and richness of fantasy and imaginative life whenever that becomes accessible to observation. Though mostly his varied fantasy life is carried on in secret, hidden away." The schizoid person is cut off from outer reality to such a degree that he or she experiences outer reality as dangerous. It is a natural human response to turn away from sources of danger and toward sources of safety. The schizoid individual, therefore, is primarily concerned with avoiding danger and ensuring safety.
Withdrawnness
According to Guntrip, withdrawnness means detachment from the outer world, the other side of introversion. While there are many schizoid individuals who will present with obvious withdrawnness (a clear and obvious timidity, reluctance, or avoidance of the external world and interpersonal relationships), this defines only a portion of such individuals. Many fundamentally schizoid people present with an engaging, interactive personality style. Such a person can appear to be available, interested, engaged, and involved in interacting with others; however, in reality, he or she is emotionally withdrawn and sequestered in a safe place in an internal world. While withdrawnness or detachment from the outer world is a characteristic feature of schizoid pathology, it is sometimes overt and sometimes covert. When it is overt it matches the usual description of the schizoid personality. Just as often, it is a covert, hidden internal state of the patient.
Several points are important to review at this time. First, what meets the objective eye may not be what is present in the subjective, internal world of the patient. Second, one should not mistake introversion for indifference. Third, one should not miss identifying the schizoid patient because one cannot see the forest of the patient’s withdrawnness through the trees of the patient’s defensive, compensatory, engaging interaction with external reality.
Narcissism
Guntrip: "Narcissism is a characteristic that arises out of the predominately interior life the schizoid lives. His love objects are all inside him and moreover he is greatly identified with them so that his libidinal attachments appear to be in himself. The question, however, is whether the intense inner life of the schizoid is due to a desire for hungry incorporation of external objects or due to withdrawal from the outer to a presumed safer inner world." The need for attachment as a primary motivational force is as strong in the schizoid person as in any other human being. However, because the schizoid's love objects are internal, he or she finds safety without connecting and attaching to objects in the real world.
Self-sufficiency
Guntrip writes, "This introverted narcissistic self-sufficiency, which does without real external relationships while all emotional relations are carried on in the internal world, is a safeguard against anxiety breaking out in dealing with actual people." The more that schizoids can rely on themselves, the less they have to rely on other people and expose themselves to the potential dangers and anxieties associated with that reliance or, even worse, dependence. The vast majority of schizoid individuals show an enormous capacity for self-sufficiency, for the ability to operate alone, independently and autonomously, in managing their worlds.
Sense of superiority
Guntrip states, "a sense of superiority naturally goes with self-sufficiency. One has no need of other people, they can be dispensed with... There often goes with it a feeling of being different from other people." The sense of superiority of the schizoid has nothing to do with the grandiose self of the narcissistic disorder. It does not find expression in the schizoid through the need to devalue or annihilate others who are perceived as offending, criticizing, shaming, or humiliating. This type of superiority was described by a young schizoid man:
"If I am superior to others, if I am above others, then I do not need others. When I say that I am above others, it does not mean that I feel better than them, it means that I am at a distance from them, a safe distance."
It is a feeling of being vertically displaced, rather than horizontally at a distance.
Loss of affect
According to Guntrip, "Loss of affect in external situations is an inevitable part of the total picture." Because of the tremendous investment made in the self — the need to be self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-reliant — there is inevitable interference in the desire and ability to feel another person’s experience, to be empathic and sensitive. Often these things seem secondary, a luxury that has to await securing one's own defensive, safe position. The subjective experience is one of loss of affect. For some patients, the loss of affect is present to such a degree that the insensitivity becomes manifest in the extreme as cynicism, callousness, or even cruelty. The patient appears to have no awareness of how his or her comments or actions affect and hurt other people. More frequently, the loss of affect is manifest within the patient as genuine confusion, a sense of something missing in his or her emotional life.
Loneliness
According to Guntrip, "Loneliness is an inescapable result of schizoid introversion and abolition of external relationships. It reveals itself in the intense longing for friendship and love which repeatedly break through. Loneliness in the midst of a crowd is the experience of the schizoid cut off from affective rapport." This is a central experience of the schizoid that is often lost to the observer. Contrary to the familiar caricature of the schizoid as uncaring and cold, the vast majority of schizoid persons who become patients express at some point in their treatment their longing for friendship and love. This is not the schizoid patient as described in the DSMs. Such longing, however, may not break through except in the schizoid’s fantasy life, to which the therapist may not be allowed access for quite a long period in treatment. If longing is immediately present, however, it is more likely avoidant personality disorder.
There is a very narrow range of schizoid individuals — the classic DSM-defined schizoid — for whom the hope of relationship is so minimal as to be almost extinct; therefore, the longing for closeness and attachment is almost unidentifiable to the schizoid themselves. These individuals will not become patients. The schizoid individual who becomes a patient does so often because of the twin motivations of loneliness and longing. This schizoid patient still believes that some kind of connection and attachment is possible and is well suited to psychotherapy. Yet the irony of the DSMs is that they may lead the psychotherapist to approach the schizoid patient with a sense of therapeutic pessimism, if not nihilism, misreading the patient by believing that the patient’s wariness is indifference and that caution is coldness.
Depersonalization
Guntrip describes depersonalization as a loss of a sense of identity and individuality. Depersonalization is a dissociative defense. Depersonalization is often described by the schizoid patient as a tuning out or a turning off, or as the experience of a separation between the observing and the participating ego. It is experienced by those with schizoid personality disorder when anxieties seem overwhelming. It is a more extreme form of loss of affect than that described earlier. Whereas the loss of affect is a more chronic state in schizoid personality disorder, depersonalization is an acute defense against more immediate experiences of overwhelming anxiety or danger.
Regression
Guntrip defined regression as "Representing the fact that the schizoid person at bottom feels overwhelmed by their external world and is in flight from it both inwards and as it were backwards to the safety of the metaphorical womb." Such a process of regression encompasses two different mechanisms: inward and backwards. Regression inward speaks to the magnitude of the reliance on primitive forms of fantasy and self-containment, often of an autoerotic or even objectless nature.... Regression backwards to the safety of the womb is a unique schizoid phenomenon and represents the most intense form of schizoid defensive withdrawal in an effort to find safety and to avoid destruction by external reality. The fantasy of regression to the womb is the fantasy of regression to a place of ultimate safety.
The description of the nine characteristics first articulated by Guntrip should bring more clearly into focus some of the major differences that exist between the traditional descriptive (track 1, DSM) portrait of the schizoid disorder and the traditional psychoanalytically informed (track 2, object relations) view. All nine characteristics are internally consistent. Most, if not all, should be present in order to diagnose a schizoid disorder.
- after the given figures on psychopathy.
