Nancy McWilliams (2006)

 

Even highly effective and emotionally secure schizoid people may worry about their sanity. (3)

The detachment of the schizoid person represents, among other things, the defensive strategy of withdrawal from overstimulation, traumatic impingement, and invalidation, and most experienced psychoanalytic clinicians know not to take it at face value, however severe and off-putting it may appear. (8)

The term may also have been influenced by the fact that the characteristic anxieties of
schizoid people concern fragmentation, diffusion, going to pieces. They feel all too vulnerable to uncontrollable schisms in the self. I have heard numerous schizoid individuals describe their personal solutions to the problem of a self experienced as dangerously fissiparous. They include wrapping oneself in a shawl, rocking, meditating, wearing a coat inside and out, retreating to a closet, and other means of self-comfort that betray the conviction that other people are more upsetting than soothing. (9)

Having been originally trained in an ego psychology model, I have found it useful to
think of the schizoid personality as defined by a fundamental and habitual reliance on the
defense mechanism of withdrawal. This withdrawal can be more or less geographical, as in the case of a man who retreats to his den or to some remote location whenever the world is too much for him, or internal, as illustrated by a woman who goes through the motions of being present while attending mostly to internal fantasies and preoccupations. Theorists in the object relations movement emphasized the presence in schizoid people of a core conflict with interpersonal closeness versus distance, a conflict in which physical (not internal) distance usually wins out (9)

In more severely disturbed schizoid people, withdrawal can look like an unremitting state
of psychological inaccessibility, whereas in those who are healthier, there is a noticeable
oscillation between connection and disconnection. Guntrip (1969, p. 36) coined the phrase “in and out programme” to describe the schizoid pattern of seeking intense affective connection followed by having to distance and re-collect the sense of self that is threatened by such intensity. Although this can be particularly visible in the sexual realm, it seems to be equally true of other instances of intimate emotional contact. (10)

A woman who simply goes away, either physically or psychically, when she is under stress, does not need to use denial or displacement or reaction formation or rationalization. Consequently, affects, images, ideas, and impulses that non-schizoid people tend to screen out of their consciousness are freely available to her, making her emotionally honest in a way that strikes me and perhaps other not-particularly-schizoid people as unexpectedly and even breathtakingly candid (10)

Although they may want their creative work to have an impact, most schizoid people I know would rather be ignored than celebrated (10)

Kerry Gordon (unpublished manuscript) notes that the schizoid person lives in a world of possibility, not probability. As with most patterns that re-enact a theme repeatedly and come to have a self-fulfilling quality, schizoid withdrawal both increases a tendency to live in primary process and creates further withdrawal because of the aversive consequences of living increasingly intimately in the realm of primary-process awareness (16)

A therapist in an audience to whom I talked about schizoid psychology voiced the
perception that schizoid people are “insufficiently incarnated,” existing in a world in which their bodies are no more real to them than their surround (17)

In contrast to obsessional patients, who avoid emotion by intellectualizing, schizoid patients may find it possible to express affect once they have the intellectual vehicle in which to do so. Because of this transitional function, the art therapies have long been seen as particularly suited to this population.
Second, sensitive clinical writers have also noted that schizoid individuals have radar for
evasion, role-playing, and the false note. For this reason and others, one may need to be more “real” with them in therapy. (22)