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For many years I have been trying to develop a fuller understanding of the subjectivities of individuals with schizoid psychologies. I am not referring to the version of schizoid personality disorder that appears in descriptive psychiatric taxonomies like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), but to the more inferential, phenomenologically oriented psychoanalytic understanding of schizoid issues. I have always been more interested in exploring individual differences than in arguing about what is and is not pathology, and I have found that when individuals with schizoid dynamics—whether patients, colleagues, or personal friends—sense that their disclosures will not be disdained (or “criminalized,” as one therapist recently put it), they are willing to share with me a lot about their inner world. As is true in many other realms, when one becomes open to seeing something, one sees it everywhere.
I have come to believe that people with significant schizoid tendencies are more common than is typically thought, and that there is a range of mental and emotional health in such people that runs from psychotically disturbed to enviably robust. Although I have become persuaded that schizoid individuals do not have “neurotic-level” conflicts (cf. Steiner, 1993), I note that the highest-functioning schizoid people, of whom there are many, seem much healthier in every meaningful respect (life satisfaction, sense of agency, affect regulation, self and object constancy, personal relationships, creativity) than many people with certifiably neurotic psychologies. Although the Jungian concept of “introversion” is perhaps a less stigmatizing term, I prefer “schizoid” because it implicitly refers to the complex intrapsychic