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Describing what he felt was the essential conflict of the schizoid personality, Ronald W. Fairbairn wrote,
the devastating nature of the conflict associated with the early oral phase [to suck or not to suck, i.e., to love or not to love] lies in the fact that, if it seems a terrible thing for an individual to destroy his object by hate, it seems a much more terrible thing for him to destroy his object by love. It is the great tragedy of the schizoid individual that his love seems to destroy; and it is because his love seems so destructive that he experiences such difficulty in directing libido towards objects in outer reality. He becomes afraid to love; and therefore he erects barriers between his objects and himself. (1952, p. 50)
Fairbairn's argument depends upon the idea that the “schizoid dilemma” (p. 51) is rooted in a pre-ambivalent phase of the relationship with the breast (before biting becomes an option), so that destructiveness cannot be attributed to a differentiated aggression that is held apart from the capacity to love in the child's mind. For a child “fixated” in this early oral phase, at least in retrospect (après coup), the very thing that attracts him to objects and attaches him to them is what seems to be driving them away or destroying them. In Fairbairn's perspective, then, the role played by hate in the constitutive dynamic of the schizoid is essentially defensive, even though it draws on the instinctual sources of aggression:
When … an individual with a schizoid tendency makes a renunciation of social contacts, it is above all because he feels that he must neither love nor be loved. He does not always rest content with a mere passive aloofness, however. On the contrary, he often takes active measures to drive his libidinal objects away from him. For this purpose he has an instrument ready to hand inside himself in the form of his own differentiated aggression. He mobilizes the resources of his hate, and directs his aggression against others—and m