One of the most striking aspects of people with schizoid personalities is their disregard for conventional social expectations.Compliance and conformity go against the grain for schizoid people, whether or not they are in touch with a painful subjective loneliness.
The schizoid self tries to stand at a safe distance from the rest of humanity. Schizoid individuals often exhibit a detached, ironic, and faintly contemptuous attitude.This tendency toward an isolated superiority may have its origins in fending off the incursions of an overcontrolling or overintrusive other. Even in the most seemingly disorganized schizophrenic patients, a kind of deliberate oppositionality has long been noted, as if the patient’s only way of preserving a sense of self-integrity is in making a farce of every conventional expectation.
What is the core sensitive temperament of the schizoid personality?
The central constitutionally sensitive temperament of the schizoid personality is evident from birth. This acute sensitivity manifests itself from birth onward in behaviors that reject experiences that are felt as too overwhelming, too impinging, too penetrating.
What type of parental relationship fosters the development of a schizoid personality?
A number of schizoid individuals describe their mothers as both cold and intrusive. For the mother, the coldness may be experienced as coming from the baby.
Schizoid individuals are frequently described by family members as hypersensitive or thin-skinned.
Some children show, from infancy on, an acute sensitivity to light, sound, touch, smell, taste, motion, and emotional tone.Their sense of being easily overwhelmed by invasive others is frequently expressed in a dread of engulfment, a fears of spiders, snakes and other devourers.
Complicating their adaptation to a world that overstimulates and agonizes them is the experience of invalidation and toxification by significant others. Most schizoid patients recall being told by exasperated parents that they were “oversensitive” or “impossible” or “too picky” or that they “make mountains out of molehills.” Thus, their painful experiences are repeatedly disconfirmed by caregivers who, because their temperament differs from that of their child, cannot identify with his or her acute sensitivities and consequently treat the child with impatience, exasperation, and even scorn.
Children develop an internalized image of a tantalizing but rejecting parent to which they are desperately attached. Such parents are often incapable of loving, or are preoccupied with their own needs. The child is rewarded when not demanding and is devalued, or ridiculed as needy for expressing dependent longings. Thus, the child’s picture of “good” behavior is distorted. The child learns never to nag or even yearn for love, because it makes the parent more distant and censorious. The child may then cover over the resulting loneliness, emptiness, and sense of ineptness with a fantasy (often unconscious) of self-sufficiency.
The tragedy of schizoid children is that they believe it is love, rather than hatred, that is the destructive force within. Love consumes.
Hence the schizoid child’s chief mental operation is to repress the normal wish to be loved.
The schizoid individual has “a consuming need for object dependence, but attachment threatens the schizoid with the loss of self.” This internal conflict, elaborated in countless ways, is the heart of the psychoanalytic understanding of schizoid personality structure.
This material is based on the article by McWilliams, N.: “Some Thoughts about Schizoid Dynamics.” The Psychoanalytic Review, 2006, Vol. 93, No. 1, pp. 1–24.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian association for Transference-Focused Psychotherapy