On the border of consciousness he is disturbed by dissatisfactions, uneasy about decisions, and tormented by the feeling of “missing out” on life. He is in conflict with himself, unsure of his feelings, and his insecurity reflects his problem of identity.
What he complained of was a loss of the feeling of self, the loss of contact with some vital aspect of existence that gives meaning to life. This missing element was an identification with the body, the foundation upon which a personal life is erected.
The feeling of identity stems from a feeling of contact with the body. To know who one is, an individual must be aware of what he feels. He should know the expression on his face, how he holds himself, and the way he moves. Without this awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
In attempting to fulfill his own image, he feels frustrated and cheated of emotional satisfaction. The image is an abstraction, an ideal, and an idol which demands the sacrifice of personal feeling. The image is a mental conception which, superimposed on the physical being, reduces bodily existence to a subsidiary role. The body becomes an instrument of the will in the service of the image. The individual is alienated from the reality of his body. Alienated individuals create an alienated society.
The aliveness of the body denotes its capacity for feeling. In the absence of feeling the body goes “dead” insofar as its ability to be impressed by or respond to situations is concerned. The emotionally dead person is turned inward: thoughts and fantasies replace feeling and action; images compensate for the loss of reality. His exaggerated mental activity substitutes for contact with the real world and can create a false impression of aliveness. Despite this mental activity, his emotional deadness is manifested physically. We shall find that his body looks “dead” or unalive.
But this relationship works in reverse too. Any decrease in the body’s motility affects its metabolism. This is because motility has a direct effect upon respiration. As a general rule, the more one moves, the more one breathes. When motility is reduced, oxygen intake is diminished, and the metabolic fires burn lower.
An active body is characterized by its spontaneity and its full and easy respiration. It will be shown in a subsequent chapter that breathing and motility are severely restricted in the schizoid body. As a result, its energy production tends to be low.
In a healthy person the ego functions to further the pleasure principle of the body. In the emotionally disturbed person the ego dominates the body and asserts that its values are superior to those of the body. The effect is to split the unity of the organism, to change a working partnership into an open conflict.
To the healthy ego sex is an expression of love. The neurotic ego sees sex as a means of conquest or ego glorification. For the schizoid ego sex is an opportunity to obtain the physical closeness and warmth upon which survival depends. The schizophrenic ego, divorced from the body, finds no meaning in the sexual act.
As part of this study we will want to find out how the split develops, what factors produce it, and what techniques are available to treat it. It should be evident at this point that the split cannot be resolved without improving the condition of the body. Breathing must be deepened, motility increased, and feelings evoked if the body is to become more alive and its reality is to govern the ego image.
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.
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.
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.
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
The schizoid individual cannot describe his problem. As far back as he can remember, he has always had some difficulty. He knows that something is wrong, but it is a vague knowledge that he cannot put into meaningful words. Without the understanding of his parents or teachers, he resigns himself to an inner desperation. He may find others who share his distress and with whom he can establish a rapport based on a mode of existence that is “different.” He can even rationalize his behavior and gain some sense of superiority by proclaiming that he is not a “square.”
Jack’s body showed the typical schizoid features. It was thin, tight, and rigid, with an underdeveloped musculature, limited motility, and restricted respiration. It was an unalive looking body, from which Jack had dissociated his ego long ago. He had never seriously engaged in sports or other physical activities. His hypochondriacal anxiety expressed his fear of his body and his lack of identification with it.
During our discussions Peter said that his sexual contact with a girl provided the only warmth he experienced and that his life was meaningless without it. Seemingly, the need for this body contact was so imperative that it overrode all rational considerations. Without it he felt so empty and unalive that moral principles had no value. I find that this condition is typical of all the delinquents I have seen. Their search for kicks is an attempt to “get a charge” into an otherwise “dead” body. Unfortunately, this search for excitement takes the form of a dangerous escapade or a rebellion against authority. The lack of normal body feeling in these young people accounts for their preoccupation with sex.
An ego that is not grounded in the reality of body feeling becomes desperate. In its desperation it will act destructively toward itself and others.
Jane was at war with her sexual feelings. She could neither accept them nor repress them. The result was an intense conflict that tormented her and from which she attempted to escape through the world of fantasy. In her fantasy, the horse can be interpreted as a symbol of the body, especially the lower half. Her attempt to deny the reality of her body was only partially successful. Its feelings intruded on her consciousness and demanded satisfaction even at the price of enormous guilt.
In terms of the two variables which determine this illness they were alike. Each one suffered from conflicts that split the unity of his personality, and in each there was some loss of contact with reality. The most important aspect of these cases, however, was that the conflict and the withdrawal were manifested physically.
Withdrawal from reality was manifested in each of the four patients by the lack of aliveness and the emotional unresponsiveness of the body.
Phrases such as “not with it” or “not all there” are commonly used to describe a schizzy quality in a person. We sense his detachment or removal. This impression stems from his vacant eyes, his masklike face, his rigid body, and his lack of spontaneity. He is not absent-minded like the proverbial professor who is absorbed in some mental preoccupation. The schizoid individual is consciously aware of his surroundings, but on the emotional or body level he is out of touch with the situation. Unfortunately, we lack an expression to denote the complement of absentmindedness. Schizzy is the only word that describes a person who is mentally present, but absent on an emotional level.
When an individual’s appearance is so bizarre that his unreality is clearly evident, he is called psychotic, schizophrenic, or insane. The schizoid person feels his unreality as an inner emptiness and as a sensation of being removed or detached from his environment. His body may feel alien to him or almost nonexistent,
As children, these people are characterized by insecurity; as adolescents by anxiety; and as adults by an inner feeling of frustration and failure. These reactions are more severe than the words imply. Their childhood insecurity is related to a feeling of being different and of not belonging. Their adolescent anxiety verges on panic and may end in terror. Their adult feeling of frustration and failure has an underlying core of despair.
Psychologically, the term “schizoid” is used to describe behavior which qualitatively resembles schizophrenia but is more or less within normal limits.6 The specific behavior patterns which suggest this diagnosis are summarized as follows:
The avoidance of any close relations with people; shyness, seclusiveness, timidity, feelings of inferiority.
Inability to express hostility and aggressive feelings directly— sensitivity to criticism, suspiciousness, the need for approval, tendencies to deny or distort.
Inability to concentrate, feelings of being dazed or doped, sensations of unreality.
Hysterical outbreaks with or without apparent provocation, such as screaming, yelling, temper tantrums.
The inability to feel emotions, especially pleasure, and the lack of emotional responsiveness to other people, or exaggerated reactions of hyperexcitement and mania.7, 8, 9
Confused as to who he is, and not knowing what he wants, the schizoid individual either detaches himself from people and withdraws into an inner world of fantasy or he adopts a pose and plays a role that seemingly will fit him into normal life. If he withdraws, symptoms of shyness, seclusiveness, suspiciousness, and unreality will predominate. If he plays a role, the outstanding symptoms will be tendencies to deny or distort, sensitivity to criticism, feelings of inferiority, and complaints of emptiness or lack of satisfaction. There may be alternations between withdrawal and activity, depression and excitement, with rapid or exaggerated mood changes. The schizoid picture presents many contrasts. Some schizoids are highly intelligent and creative, although their pursuits may be limited and unusual, while others appear dull and lead empty, docile, and inconspicuous lives
A body is forsaken when it becomes a source of pain and humiliation instead of pleasure and pride. Under these conditions the person refuses to accept or identify with his body. He turns against it. He may ignore it or he may attempt to transform it into a more desirable object by dieting, weight lifting, etc. However, as long as the body remains an object to the ego, it may fulfill the ego’s pride, but it will never provide the joy and satisfaction that the “alive” body offers.
The alive body is characterized by a life of its own. It has a motility independent of ego control which is manifested by the spontaneity of its gestures and the vivacity of its expression. It hums, it vibrates, it glows. It is charged with feeling.
I have repeatedly stressed how afraid people are to feel their bodies. On some level they are aware that the body is a repository of their repressed feelings, and while they would very much like to know about these repressed feelings, they are loathe to encounter them in the flesh. Yet, in their desperate search for an identity, they must eventually confront the state of their bodies. They must accept the relevance of their physical condition to their mental functioning, despite the doubt with which they approach this proposition. To overcome this doubt, they must experience their physical tension as a limitation of personality, and the release of this tension as a liberation of the personality.
The discovery that the body has a life of its own and the capacity to heal itself is a revelation of hope. The realization that the body has its own wisdom and logic inspires a new respect for the instinctive forces of life.
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The first, an “integrative pleasure deficiency,” denotes an inability to experience pleasure. The second, “a sort of proprioceptive diathesis,” refers to a distorted awareness of the bodily self. The pleasure deficiency handicaps the individual in his attempt to develop an effective “action self,” or identity. Since pleasure is “the tie that really binds” (Rado), the action self that emerges in the absence of this binding power of pleasure is brittle, weak, prone to break under stress, hypersensitive. This pleasure deficiency to which Rado refers has characterized all the schizoid patients I have seen. But where Rado regards it as an inherited predisposition, I explain it in terms of the struggle for survival. Uncertain of his right to exist, and committing all his energies to the struggle for survival, the schizoid individual necessarily bypasses the area of pleasurable activity. To a man fighting for his right to exist, pleasure is an irrelevant concept.
The withdrawal from reality produces a split in the personality, just as every split results in a loss of contact with reality. The significance of body perception can be appreciated if one accepts Rado’s remark that “the proprioceptive awareness [of the body] is the deepest internal root of language and thought.”
individuals with a schizoid temperament tended to have an asthenic body build, or more rarely, an athletic body build. Broadly speaking, the asthenic body can be described as long and thin, with an underdeveloped musculature, while the athletic body is more evenly proportioned and better developed muscularly
Factors such as vivacity, vitality, grace, spontaneity of gesture, and physical warmth are significant because they affect self-perception and influence the feeling of identity.
A total view of the schizoid problem should present in a unified concept both the psychic and physical symptoms of the disturbance:
The psychological lack of identity.
The disturbance in self-perception.
The relative immobility and the diminished tone of the body surface.
Fears become nameless and faceless when they are repressed. In the unconscious, they live on, with the terrifying effect they had upon the child. After a patient has been successfully released from the grip of this terror, some of its elements become clear. These are the fear of being abandoned, the fear of being destroyed, and the fear of destroying someone. But these are specific fears because they are conscious, while the unconscious terror of the schizoid is an amorphous dread whose tentacles chill the bones and paralyze the will. This terror is like the proverbial skeleton in the closet, which becomes less frightening when the door has been opened and its reality confronted. Before the closed door which hides the unknown, the person trembles with an overwhelming fear that saps his courage and defeats his resolution.
The overall effect of such experiences is to inhibit the individual’s aggression. The schizoid individual becomes afraid to make demands on life that would lead to pleasure and satisfaction. Reaching out to the world evokes a vague sense of terror. He guards against this terror by narrowing his environment and restricting his activities.
In all schizoid patients the terror is related to the fear of losing control, since loss of control would allow the emergence of repressed impulses which, as in Paul’s case, carry in their wake the possibility of catastrophic results.
The inhibition of aggression, the restriction of activity, and the necessity for control impose a rigidity upon the body that limits self-assertive gestures. Impulses are restrained, and finally, impulse formation is weakened. Having repressed his desires out of fear, the schizoid individual ends up not knowing what he wants. The denial of pleasure leads to a rejection of the body. To survive in the face of terror he deadens his body by reducing his breathing and his motility.
To the degree that he can keep himself aloof from emotional relationships, he can avoid the terror that might follow the breakthrough of repressed impulses. His physical rigidity serves the same purpose. But detachment and isolation diminish his contact with reality, undermine his ego, and weaken his sense of identity. Non-involvement also deprives him of the emotional satisfactions which sustain normal relationships and provide an inner feeling of well-being. Finally, rigidity creates an inner emptiness and vacuum which threatens to collapse the schizoid structure.
When the will becomes the primary mechanism of action, displacing the normal motivating force of pleasure, the individual is functioning in a schizoid manner.
The schizoid individual is intensely willful. He is willful in the sense of being obstinate and defiant, but he is also willful in that every action is forced and determined. Sometimes he is successful, but more often not. Generally, each effort of will collapses into despair and hopelessness. As one of my patients remarked, “I am always turning over a new leaf, only to find that it becomes brown before I accomplish anything.” What is lacking in the schizoid structure is a reliance upon the natural and spontaneous functioning of the body. Another schizoid patient told me, “I can’t understand how my body keeps working by itself. I think it will stop at any time. I’m surprised that it keeps going on. I’m always afraid that it’s going to get out of control.”
In the alive body the charge at the periphery is manifested in the tone and color of the skin, in the brightness of the eyes, in the spontaneity of gesture and in the relaxed state of the body musculature.
Necessarily, contact with the external environment is tenuous. Action upon the world to gain satisfaction is generally ineffective. The chronic contraction of the deep muscles is responsible for the narrowing of the body which gives it the typical asthenic appearance.
The immobilization of the body musculature in the schizoid condition has a double meaning. On one hand, it is a defense against terror and a means of maintaining some unity in the personality. On the other hand, it is a direct expression of the terror, since it represents the physical attitude of one who is frozen stiff with fear.
As long as he remained frozen, the terror would be hidden, like a skeleton in a closed closet. He had to thaw and reach out before this perception became possible. Only through the experience of the terror and its resolution into its component fears was there any hope for a significant improvement in his personality.
What are the forces that unify the personality in the normal and the schizoid individual? In the normal person, body and mind are held together by the integrative function of pleasure. This refers to capacity for pleasure. Since pleasure is a principle of the body, the mind which anticipates pleasure affirms its identity with the body on the deepest level of experience. The capacity for pleasure also guarantees a steady stream of impulses reaching to the world for satisfaction. In the absence of this pleasure function, impulses are tentative and infrequent. The schizoid person therefore depends upon his will to cement mind to body. But the will, though hard as steel, is brittle, whereas pleasure is flexible and pervasive. It acts like the sap in the living tree to provide strength and elasticity.
The idea that there are two different mechanisms for maintaining the unity of a personality suggests that there may be some validity to the concept that somatic illness and mental illness tend to be mutually exclusive and antithetical, and that, broadly speaking, an individual is predisposed to one or to the other, but not to both at the same time.
When the pleasure functions disintegrate, one may generally expect somatic illness, while the disintegration of the will produces mental illness. Thus, one can anticipate an interchangeability of symptoms, depending on the state of functioning of the total organism.
The schizoid individual defends himself against terror and insanity by one of two strategies. The most common defensive strategy, as has been described above, is a physical and psychological rigidity that serves to repress feeling and keep the body under the control of the ego. It is structured to withstand insults from the outside world in the form of rejection and disappointment. It is a fortress within which the schizoid lives in the relative security of illusion and fantasy.
Thus, the two maneuvers by which the schizoid can defend himself can be described as (1) the rigid barricade, or (2) the retreat from the field of action. In the retreat the schizoid individual surrenders most of his troops (muscular tone) and loses the ability to fight back, although he retains control of the rest of his personality.
The person who rejects the irrational negates the infant within him. He has learned, unfortunately, that it’s no use crying, mother never comes anyway! He makes few demands on life because he has been taught early that his demands were unreasonable. He doesn’t become angry because anger had always provoked retaliation. He has become a “reasonable man,” but in the process he has lost the motivation of pleasure and the aliveness of his body. He has, in this process, developed a schizoid tendency. Yet the irrational breaks through in perverse form: he finds himself subject to violent rages, depressions, and strange compulsions. He feels withdrawn and detached or overwhelmed and embroiled.
In a healthy person the irrational is not suppressed in favor of the reasonable. The healthy person accepts his feelings even when they run counter to the apparent logic of the situation. The schizoid denies his feelings, while the neurotic distrusts them. The body is abandoned when the irrational is denied and feeling is repressed. To reclaim the body, an individual must accept the irrational within himself.
The awesomeness of the irrational is that it has the power to move us. It is the source of creativity and the fountain of joy. All great experiences have this irrational quality, which enables them to move us from within. As everyone knows, love and orgasm are the irrational experiences we all seek. Thus, the person who is afraid of the irrational is afraid of love and orgasm. He is also afraid to let his body go, to let his tears flow and to let his voice break. He is afraid to breathe and afraid to move. When the irrational is repressed it becomes a demonic force that may lead a sick person to destructive actions. In normal living, the irrational manifests itself by involuntary movements—the spontaneous gesture, the sudden laugh, even the twitching of the body before one falls asleep.
In this day of wonder drugs it is generally overlooked that the body has a natural capacity to heal itself. We are familiar with this property of the body when it comes to minor wounds and illnesses. Doctors count upon this property in major illnesses and operations. In most cases, medicine aims to remove the obstacles that impede this natural function of the body. Emotional illness is not an exception to this principle. The therapeutic task is to remove the obstacles that prevent the body from spontaneously releasing its tensions. This principle underlies the psychoanalytic process.
It is hoped that if a person can consciously accept the irrational in his personality, he will be free to respond naturally and spontaneously to life situations. The weakness in this concept is that the conscious acceptance of a feeling does not lead, necessarily, to the ability to express this feeling. It is one thing to recognize that one is sad, it is another to be able to cry.
To many people, as to my mother, the animal is not to be trusted because he is an unreasoning beast. He is guided by his feelings and moved by his passions, and is therefore unpredictable. On the body level, the human being is an animal whose behavior is unpredictable from a rational point of view. This doesn’t mean that the body or the animal is dangerous, destructive, and uncontrollable. The body and the animal obey certain laws, which are not the laws of logic. The animal lover finds the animal perfectly comprehensible. To the person in touch with his body, the feelings of the body make complete sense.
The superficial picture the patient presented was that of a person who was afraid that he would be unable to breathe under stress. However, the real picture was that of a person who was afraid to breathe because of the feelings it would evoke. He also suffered from severe sexual anxiety relating to his guilt about masturbation. The tightness and contraction of his abdomen were the means he used to suppress his sexual feeling and avoid the guilt and anxiety. The result of this maneuver was that his anxiety was displaced to his chest. Abdominal breathing made him conscious of his original anxiety and guilt, and the release of his anxiety made it possible for him to let his belly out and to breathe down into his abdomen.
