#szpdquotes

Compulsive, frantic talking or behavior helps the schizoid to compensate for his apathy and inner emptiness by giving others the impression that he is alive and engaged. This may include pressured talking, imitation of others, exhibition of pseudoemotions, or efforts to become funny or entertaining.

With its one-sided focus on the schizoid’s anhedonia and blunted affect, the descriptive psychology tradition paints the portrait of a person completely unfamiliar with anger, affection, joy, or sadness. Yet, it is not that schizoid personalities are without feelings, but rather that feelings are usually channeled inward and played out within an emotionally charged fantasy life rather than being expressed outwardly. The schizoid is all too familiar with the feeling of overwhelming terror that he will fall apart, become unglued, exposed, or annihilated if his feelings were to surface. He knows what it is to experience intense hopelessness, powerless, and vulnerability interacting with others in the world. Living a life without companions, he often feels needy, deprived, unloved, and lonely. In social situations, unable to make meaningful contact, he feels rejected, unwanted, and even hated.

The 'self-conscious' person is caught in a dilemma. He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality. One finds extremely subtle efforts expended in order to resolve this dilemma in terms of the secret inner self and the behavioral false-self systems already described. James, for instance, feels that 'other people provide me with my existence.' On his own, he feels that he is empty and nobody. 'I can't feel real unless there is someone there...' Nevertheless, he cannot feel at ease with another person, because he feels as 'in danger' with others as by himself.

In dealing with schizoid patients, one notices the frequency with which wishes to disappear, vanish, become invisible, withdraw, not exist, and die as well as wishes to come alive, be more spontaneous, transform oneself, and be reborn, as it were, appear in their associations. Patients talk about going away to places where no one would know them, moving to Eastern countries, and retreating to one or the other form of cloisetered existance. However, if one listens carefully, one finds that the patient also has a “fantasy of return” from such withdrawal. Often the scenario consists of relocating to a place where one would achieve anonymity which, after a period of months or years, is followed by the gradual development of friendship with one or two people in the community. Fantasies of long and rejuvenating sleep also portray the patient’s biphasic attitude about attachment and object relations.

Other people were necessary for his existence, said James. Another patient, in the same basic dilemma, behaved in the following way: he maintained himself in isolated detachment from the world for months, living alone in a single room, existing frugally on a few savings, daydreaming. But in doing this, he began to feel he was dying inside; he was becoming more and more empty, and observed 'a progressive impoverishment of my life mode.' A great deal of his pride and self-esteem was implicated in thus existing on his own, but as his state of depersonalization progressed he would emerge into social life for a brief foray in order to get a 'dose' of other people, but 'not an overdose.' He was like an alcoholic who goes on sudden drinking orgies between dry spells, except that in his case his addiction, of which he was as frightened and ashamed as any repentent alcoholic or drug-addict, was to other people. Within a short while, he would come to feel that he was in danger of being caught up or trapped in the circle he had entered and he would withdraw again into his own isolation in a confusion of frightened hopelessness, suspicion, and shame.

One suspects that underlying all this is a rather literal matter of wanting to erase, wipe-off, or at least, hide the self. The effort is directed at minimizing mental activity by means that are both gross and subtle. The lowered energetic thermostat is ultimately aimed to achieve psychic death of sorts. Manifestations of this tendency vary. On a gross level, there is chronic suicidality which - itself drained of energy - remains rather passive; one simply waits for death.