If we ignore the external environment, the schizophrenic personality reveals four features: an unresolved conflict between life and death instincts; preponderance of destructive impulses; hatred of external and internal reality; tenuous but tenacious object relationships. This constellation necessitates a progression through the infantile paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions different from that in nonpsychotic personalities, because the schizophrenic resorts in a massive way to projective identification (projection of a split-off part of the personality onto an object, leaving the psyche impoverished). Treatment of the schizophrenic is unsuccessful until he works through his attacks on his ego and his substitution of projective identification for repression and introjection. The author believes there is a psychotic component in the severe neurotic, to whom similar principles therefore apply.