Who Will We See Around Us If We Recognize The Word "schizoid"

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

If you want to understand what is going on in the souls of other people and what to expect from them, it is sometimes useful to arm yourself with this or that typology of characters. This "intellectual optics" can help you, as in infrared radiation, to see the ghosts that inhabit other people's souls. But if to be a little more serious, then we can say that the typology of characters allows for some external signs to suggest how the psyche and personality of the person you are observing is structured. At least make assumptions about some of the principles of its structure.

In the last article, it was proposed to use to describe the characters and psyche of people not such concepts that have now become fashionable as "narcissist" or "manipulator" - but to use a more differentiated conceptual grid.

We began to describe a psychological typology based on the concept of “character accentuation”. And the first psychotype that we described was "Hysterics" … Today we will try to describe a somewhat opposite type of character, called schizoid.

Schizoids and their "inner world"

One of the well-known specialists in characterology, Maya Zakharovna Dukarevich, believed that the basis of the schizoid type of personality, its "core" is directed towards the inside of one's psyche and manifests itself in a weak and loose connection with the outside world. In this sense, she contrasted schizoids with hysterics, who, in her opinion, in their intentions are more likely to be turned into the outside world.

In principle, this approach to describing the essence of the schizoid personality type is correct, but very often people are misled by the term "inner world". Sometimes the inner world is understood as a specific reservoir filled with hidden thoughts and feelings of a person, his emotions, fantasies and images. It is assumed that the outside world is a real, social world in which all people live and interact with each other. And the inner world is something subjective, individual, “psychological”.

However, the inner world of schizoids has nothing in common with subjectivity and a tendency to contemplate their experiences. Hysteroids are no less subjective and show noticeably more attention to their feelings and the self-created image of themselves. In the same way as representatives of other psychotypes.

Schizoids in the context of the theory of Carl Gustav Jung

If we use the theoretical models of the founding fathers of psychology, we can turn to the idea of the "collective unconscious" put forward by Jung. In the light of this theory, one can notice or assume that schizoids are those who are more dependent on the collective unconscious than on individual conscious or unconscious human experiences. Unlike other representatives of humanity, living in the realities of the local sinful world, it is not something displaced from the sphere of their consciousness that breaks into the soul of schizoids, but the images of the collective unconscious. In the consciousness of schizoids, not forgotten fears break through, not suppressed aggression and repressed ones, aimed at specific people, but archetypes - images from a completely different world, which can hardly be called “internal”.

Thus, the "inner world" to which the attention of schizoids is drawn is not localized in the human psyche, but (I am not afraid of this loud word) turns out to be transcendental both to the world external to a person and to his psyche.

Schizoids can very closely peer into the realities of the "external world", but only, unlike representatives of other psychotypes, they see and notice something different in this world. Other events, other patterns, other connections.

It is also impossible to say with certainty that schizoids are asocial: society may well fall into the sphere of their attention, only they will highlight in it not quite what various extroverts, hysteroids and paranoids pay attention to.

If you believe Jung, the collective unconscious knocks on our soul and consciousness with its archetypes, muddy images and not very embossed forms. Schizoids are sensitive to these forms, they may seem more real to them than ordinary people, and more worthy of attention. It is for this reason that they are not so sensitive to the hustle and bustle of our everyday world. We can say that they are carried away by the contemplation of eternity, although this does not at all guarantee that they can necessarily consider anything in this eternity.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious has absorbed all the wisdom and stupidity of our ancestors, of all mankind, from the very moment of its appearance. But few people manage to talk with this extract of human wisdom, including schizoids. This generalized experience is difficult to understand in terms of concrete momentary concepts; for this reason, schizoids prefer formal logic to life experience and detached theorizing of daily practice. Schizoids can be excited about very abstract concepts that seem pretentious and boring to ordinary people.

Schizoids in the context of Plato's history

Other metaphors that make it possible to better understand what schizoids are and what is the "inner core" of this psychotype can be found in the philosophy of Plato.

In various philosophies and religions, it is widely believed that human souls remember a lot of what their carriers saw during their past lives. Plato believed that souls remember in general - everything. Everything that they saw in that real true world from which they appear to people.

Memories of the soul are, in principle, available to anyone. True, we manage to remember only a little in our entire life, and even then - not very distinctly and clearly. In addition, most people do not try to remember anything at all, they are completely absorbed in the mortal affairs of their current life. That is, they doom themselves to voluntary unconsciousness.

It cannot be said that schizoids are more loyal supporters of some "real world" than all other people. It would be more correct to say that it is simply more difficult for them to get rid of all these vague and unclear memories. And for this reason, they simply cannot devote as much time to social fun as, for example, hysterics do. Schizoids are doomed to rise above this world and find formal patterns in it, as well as track implicit connections. This circumstance gives the behavior of schizoids a certain emotional detachment, which sometimes allows us to say about them that they are not of this world.

Schizoids in the context of ideas about schizophrenia

The term "schizoid" has persistent associations with schizophrenia, but it has no special relation to this disease. We can only assume that if a schizoid was in a psychiatric clinic, then, most likely, his diagnosis would be schizophrenia. However, schizoids do not suffer from psychiatric illnesses more often than all other people.

Nevertheless, in order to understand the essence of this psychotype, it makes sense to look at what will happen if this variant of character accentuation is inflated to the level of mental illness.

The specificity of such a mental illness as schizophrenia was most vividly described in the works of Russian psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Bluma Wolfovna Zegarnik.

In particular, schizophrenia manifests itself in special thinking disorders. With some reservations, these violations can be considered as the peculiarities of thinking inherent in schizoids brought to an exaggerated level.

• If schizoids tend to consider ordinary things in slightly changed semantic contexts, then schizophrenics, according to Zeigarnik, suffer from a radical shift in the perception of reality in the direction far from common sense.
• If schizoids are able to rise above specifics and make complex generalizations, then when a person is ill with schizophrenia, a person begins to make too fanciful and ridiculous generalizations.
• A distinctive feature of schizoids is the ability to find hidden and not very obvious patterns in events - schizophrenics begin to establish fanciful patterns based on insignificant (latent) signs.

Finally, schizophrenics suffer from the so-called "diversity of thinking." That is, they are unable to combine various fragments of their observations, thoughts and experiences into a single picture. Their world, as it were, does not gather into a single meaningful and harmonious whole: phenomena of different significance and semantic load are not quite justifiably compared with each other. There is a feeling that meanings and events from different places, seen by different people, are projected into their consciousness. Separate subpersonalities of a person do not seem to be collected into a single personality.

If we return to the idea of the “collective unconscious” or the metaphor of the Platonic anamnesis, then we can say that in the case when the schizoid cannot cope with the pressure of the collective unconscious, he falls into illness. The same happens when the “memories of his soul” are too pushy and intrusive without becoming more comprehensible; memories of the "real world" turn into delirium or fanciful fantasies and resonance.

The stronger the intellect and the higher the educational level of the schizoid, the less likely it is that something can drive him crazy. In the presence of a strong intellect and erudition, the pressure of the "collective unconscious", as well as the influence of some other entities that open up to schizoids in their mental contemplation, leads to the fact that representatives of this psychotype often become mathematicians and physicists.

But, on the other hand, intellectual neglect and lack of discipline of the mind can turn schizoids into ridiculous and boring dreamers or boring reasoners. And if some assertive archetype or crazy idea flies into such a lazy mind or neglected and untrained psyche, then they can simply drive the abstract thinker crazy.

It should be noted right away that representatives of other psychotypes also have many of their own ways and ways to end up in a psychiatric clinic, but most people still manage to avoid this fate. As already mentioned, schizoids are no more likely to suffer from mental illness than all other people.

The myth of the emotional coldness of schizoids

There is a strong belief that schizoids are cold and emotionally detached people. However, this is not entirely true, and it may not be true at all. The emotional and sensory sphere of schizoids is indeed somewhat different from the experiences of the average person. And the most interesting thing is that with some common features of the sensory sphere for all schizoids, the emotional world of one schizoid can be very different from another. The fact is that schizoids "grow" their feelings at their own discretion and in their own logic, and do not try to copy patterns of emotions and feelings from the behavior of other people.

Schizoids can appear to be people devoid of feelings, because they express their emotions and experiences differently from ordinary people, and sometimes they may not react to the ways of demonstrating their experiences accepted by other people. The schizoid may seem outwardly calm and even lethargic while a sea of emotions rages in his soul or streams of seething feelings flow.

But in some cases, accusations against schizoids are fully justified. They can abstract themselves so strongly from reality that they simply lose the habit of perceiving other people's feelings and lose the skills not only to express their emotions, but even to experience them. However, for the sake of fairness, it is worth noting that ardent extroverts or hysterics can bring themselves to a state of emotional cooling. True, they achieve this result in other ways - by fleeing from emotional stress into the zone of "insensible" but calm comfort.

Feelings of schizoids are as unusual and far from conventionality as their thoughts, and their sensory sphere is just as susceptible to focus on what was above called the "inner world" or "collective unconscious." If an ordinary person endows his beloved or beloved with the features of some kind of image or "cultural hero" close to his heart, then the schizoid projects onto the image of his love something incomprehensible, extracted from the depths of his schizoid soul, about which indistinct archetypes beat and in which they swim not very clear even to himself fantasies.

So if you fell in love with a schizoid, then you will need a translator from ordinary language of feelings to schizoid - and vice versa. Simple everyday empathy will not help matters here. You need to become a researcher going to another country, the language of which no one knows.

And if it so happened that you yourself are a schizoid and fell in love with a schizoid, then, of course, you will find a kindred soul in something, but you both will still need an interpreter.

Thus, schizoids are people who tend to listen to noises coming from the depths of their psyche

Your understanding of what is causing these "noises" depends on which psychological theory you are more inclined to believe. If we consider the psyche of the schizoid within the framework of the concept of the "collective unconscious" proposed by Jung, then we can say that archetypes and other images of universal human memory knock on the soul of schizoids. But regardless of any theory, we see that schizoids are prone to introspection, have not very standard thinking and are able to distinguish not very obvious patterns and connections in what is happening. They are more fond of generalizations than specifics; and in their sensual sphere a somewhat different music sounds than in the souls of other representatives of humanity.