the feeling of defeat and despair, but he had to accept these feelings to find himself.
Henry's body was more alive than Barbara's. His musculature was better developed, and his skin had warmth and color. He had severe muscular tensions, which produced a bowing of the back, so that he was hunched forward and had to make an effort to straighten up. His neck muscles were very tense, and his neck was shortened. He had great difficulty in breathing under stress and he showed his respiratory difficulty in the tendency to blow the air out in expiration. He was also a heavy smoker. The tension in his body musculature was so severe that it bound him as if by chains. He was struggling against inner restraints of which he was unconscious, but committing all his energies to success in the outer world. Thus, he was split between the ego image and the reality of his body, between the outer aspects of success and achievement and the inner feeling of defeat and frustration.
Henry's problem could be superficially understood in terms of his neurotic drive for success. In his unconscious mind, his body was a beast of burden to be harnessed to the demands of his ego. The body experienced these demands as a yoke which deprived it of freedom and denied it pleasure and satisfaction. Henry's body, unlike Barbara's, fought back. However, to the degree that he was out of contact with his body and unaware of its feelings, Henry showed schizoid tendencies. The sacrifice of his freedom was not made for financial success, as Henry believed, but for the image of success he had formed in his youth. To mobilize the body for the satisfaction of a real need (hunger, sex, pleasure, etc.) is to use it, while to subvert it for the fulfillment of an ego goal is to misuse or abuse it.
Henry's problem was not as severe as Barbara's. He grasped and accepted the relation between the self and the body. Barbara could only concede a possibility, “If you say so!” Henry recognized that he had to release the muscular tensions in his body and he attacked this problem with an intensity that increased his tension. Barbara sensed the immobility of her body, but felt helpless to do anything about it. Barbara experienced her body as alien to her personality; she even expressed the wish not to have a body, which she viewed as a source of torment. She had been willing to sacrifice her body to satisfy the witch in her. Henry, on the other hand, accepted his body, but misused it. He subjected his body to his egotistic demand for success, hoping thereby to gain his freedom; but when success failed to produce freedom Henry realized he needed help.
The schizoid conflict is a struggle between life and death and can be expressed as “to be or not to be.” By contrast, the neurotic conflict stems from guilt and anxiety about pleasure. This is not to say that the schizoid is free from such guilt and anxiety, but in his personality they are subordinated to the imperative need to survive. The schizoid personality pays a price for his existence: that price is the surrender of his right to make overt demands on life. The surrender of this right leads necessarily to some form of sacrifice, such as was seen in Barbara's case, and to an existence which finds its only satisfaction in negation. The negation of life in any form is a manifestation of a schizoid tendency, and in this sense, every emotional problem has a schizoid core.
2
The Schizoid Disturbance
The term “schizoid” has two meanings. It denotes (1) a tendency of the individual to withdraw from reality and (2) a split in the unity of the personality. Each aspect is a reflection of the other. These two variables are a measure of the emotional health or illness of the individual.
In emotional health the personality is unified and in full contact with reality. In schizophrenia the personality is divided and withdrawn from reality. Between the two lies the broad range of the schizoid states in which the withdrawal from reality is manifested by some degree of emotional detachment and the unity of the personality is maintained by the power of rational thought. Figure 4 illustrates these relationships.
FIG. 4 Contact with Reality Unity of the Personality
This schema also includes the psychic disorders known as the neuroses. The neuroses, A. P. Moyes writes, are a “relatively benign group of personality disturbances,” in which the “personality remains socially organized.”4 This is not to say that the neurotic individual has a well-integrated personality. Every neurotic problem stems from a conflict in the personality which splits its unity to some extent and reduces its contact with reality. In both the neuroses and the psychoses there is an evasion of reality; the difference, as Freud points out, is that the neurotic ignores reality while the psychotic denies it. However, every withdrawal or evasion of reality is an expression of the schizoid disturbance.
Against the background of a seemingly adjusted personality, neurotic symptoms have a dramatic quality which dominates the clinical picture. A neurotic phobia, obsession, or compulsion is often so striking that it focuses the attention to the exclusion of the underlying schizoid split. In this situation, treatment tends to be directed to the symptom rather than to the more deep-seated personality problem. Such an approach is necessarily less effective than one which sees the symptoms as a manifestation of the basic conflict between the ego and the body and directs the therapeutic effort to the healing of this split. In Figure 4, I have placed the neuroses in parentheses to indicate that they are included in the schizoid phenomenon.
One reason for the increasing recognition of the schizoid problem is the shift of psychiatric interest from the symptom to the personality. Psychotherapists are growing increasingly aware of the lack of feeling, the emotional detachment, and the depersonalization of their patients. It is now generally recognized that the schizoid condition with its deep-seated anxieties is directly responsible for symptom formation. Important as the symptom is to the disturbed individual, it occupies a secondary role in current psychological thinking. If symptoms are alleviated in psychotherapy without regard to the underlying schizoid disturbance, the treatment is regarded as supportive and the results are considered to be only temporary. To the degree, however, that the schizoid split can be overcome, the improvement in the patient occurs on all levels of his personality.
While psychotherapists are conscious of the widespread incidence of schizoid tendencies in the population, the general public is ignorant of this disorder. The average person still thinks in terms of neurotic symptoms and assumes that in the absence of an alarming symptom, everything is all right. The consequences of this attitude may be disastrous, as in the case of a young person who commits suicide without warning or suffers a so-called nervous breakdown. But even if no tragedy occurs, the effects of the schizoid disturbance are so serious that we cannot overlook its presence in neurotic behavior or wait until a crisis occurs.
Late adolescence is a critical period for the schizoid individual. The strong sexual feelings that flood his body at this time often undermine an adjustment which he had previously been able to maintain. Many young people find themselves unable to complete their high school studies. Others do so with an effort, but run into trouble in the first years of college. On the surface the problem may appear as described below.
A teenager who had done fairly well at school runs into difficulty with his studies. His marks drop, his interest lags, he becomes restless, and he starts running around with “bad” characters. His parents ascribe his behavior to a lack of discipline, poor will power, rebelliousness, or the mood of today's youngsters. They may close their eyes to his difficulties in the hope that he will outgrow them. This rarely happens. They may berate the young person and attempt to coerce him into a more responsible attitude. This generally fails. In the end, they reluctantly accept the idea that seemingly bright children become “dropouts,” that some are just naturally “floaters,” that many young people from good backgrounds engage in destructive or delinquent activities; and they give up any attempt to comprehend the attitude
