sadness

The Schizoid Dilemma

When you grow up in an oppressive and abusive home where you are treated as a thing and not a person with rights and feelings, you are likely to feel that you have only two choices:

1.     A Master/Slave Relationship: You can be in a relationship, but that means (based on your childhood experiences) that you agree to be treated as a thing and the other person has the right to dominate you and dictate the terms of the relationship. No negotiation is possible.

2.     Complete Isolation: You become completely independent and give up even attempting to make intimate connections, or you settle for partial relationships, or even fantasies of relationships that exist mainly in your mind. No real connection is possible.

(My understanding of Schizoid phenomena is primarily based on the work of Ralph Klein, MD who wrote extensively and exquisitely clearly about the Schizoid Disorder of the Self in, Disorders of the Self: New Therapeutic Horizons—The Masterson Approach, NY: Brunner/Mazel, 1995, pp. 3–142, and who was my teacher at The Masterson Institute and later my colleague).

·       Existential Dread and a Sense of Meaninglessness

When people with Schizoid adaptations choose isolation over becoming someone else’s puppet, they can go too far. At a certain point it is a bit like a person suffering from anorexia who once chose not to eat, but now cannot eat.

As Schizoid individuals move further and further from the possibility of connecting with other people, life starts to feel increasingly meaningless. If this continues, they begin to feel what they describe as “existential dread.” They fear becoming so disconnected that it is as if they are dead while they are alive and they will no longer have the ability to reconnect.

·       The Dream of Drifting in Deep Space

Many Schzoid clients report remarkedly similar versions of the same nightmare that metaphorically represents this isolated and disconnected state:

I am in a space ship and I suit up to make a needed repair to the outside of the ship. I am connected to the ship by my air hose. I am crawling over the surface of the ship when I lose my grasp on my handhold. I drift off into space wth only my hose still connecting me to the ship. I am terrified that any moment my hose will break and I will drift off into deep space. I will have no sense of whether I am upright or upside down. I will die all alone screaming for help, but no one will hear me. I wake up terrified.

This same theme often pops up in science fiction movies.

·       The Existential Philosophers

Many of my Schizoid clients are attracted to the writings of the Existential philosophers. They identify with Jean Paul Sartre’s statement that “Hell is other people” and Franz Kafka’s books, such as The Metamorphosis where a man becomes a cockroach, and The Trial, where a man is prosecuted for an unknown crime by a remote and unreasonable bureaucracy.

·       The Existential Crisis

The hallmark of severe Schizoid disorders is an existential crisis: life ceases to have meaning, there is nothing of interest to look forward to, and the person questions the whole point of living. This is accompanied by feelings of despair. Sometimes these clients become preoccupied with death and dying.

One client could no longer function. All he reported doing all day was looking at everyone he met and wondering: “When will this person die?”

Punchline: Because only my Schizoid clients report having existential crises (never Borderline or Narcissistic clients), I consider existential angst and a preoccupation with death and the meaningless of life one of the signs that I am dealing with a profoundly Schizoid client.

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