About Schizoids

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

One of the essential skills in therapeutic work is the ability to clarify. Sometimes it takes a very long time for it to become clear that this is a schizoid client. A lot, because it is difficult for them to talk about themselves, it is difficult to be clear, and at the same time, the external defenses with which they support themselves can be very different from what is inside. You have to wind circles around, observing, comparing and questioning many times, constantly relying on phenomenology.

When it comes to describing schizoid dynamics, the language itself becomes, as it were, a little detached, restrained, rational. In relationships, schizoids can appear emotionally unavailable, avoidant, slow or poorly responsive to requests and approach of a partner. This happens because the main internal conflict of the schizoid is the conflict between approach and distance. Proximity is unsafe in that it is exhausting, and at the same time, the need for it is very high. The schizoid is attracted to emotional people, but an extremely important condition for being in a relationship is that the partner preserves the ability for them to withdraw to the required distance and time. Only in solitude does the schizoid restore energy. It is important for them that the partner understands how they work and takes this into account. The fear of absorption and the desire to consume can be combined in such people in a paradoxical way. At the same time, they can be very attentive to their own and other people's boundaries.

Since the formation of a schizoid character occurs in infancy during interaction with a nursing mother and arises from a reaction to the breast, the schizoid has a special relationship with food, which he extrapolates to humans.

The desire to consume, insatiable hunger and the greedy need for intimacy with the "desired defector" (who has gone over to his side to an important other) are combined in his relationship with the fear of destruction, destruction, and associated anxiety and guilt.

With a subjectively experienced impossibility to have the desired, insufficiently compensated schizoids can feel a loss of interest and withdraw into themselves, breaking important connections, experiencing futility, up to a total loss of meaning.

In some of them, the unconscious will be less hidden under psychic protection than in others. The former are usually called sensitive, the latter expansive.

Schizoids are prone to intellectualization and self-sufficient in the sense that they have a rich, saturated inner world in which they build relationships with their inner objects. An important part of their emotional life is fantasy and creativity. They are self-centered, not afraid of someone else's assessment, and they themselves treat people without judgment. Achievements for them are important not in order to compete with the environment, but as a result of their deep interest in the field that they have chosen for themselves. Interesting and talented natures, they sometimes suffer from insufficient connection with reality in the sphere of relationships, which, without additional reliance on a reliable partner, does not always give them the opportunity to fully realize themselves.

If a schizoid comes into therapy, he would rather investigate how he himself and his relationship with society work. He has a well-developed ego function, so he knows how to make choices and make decisions on his own. It will be necessary for the therapist to be able to give him enough freedom, and at the same time to help and maintain his interest in researching issues that are important to him, without going too far into intellectualization.