To be honest, I really don’t know…
According to the DSM, schizoids are “sensitive”. I’m not an expert in that system of diagnosis, or indeed any. Rather, I studied a lot of psychoanalytic literature when I was doing my PhD in another field. My area is cultural studies, but it really is an interdisciplinary field in its own right.
What I found through my own very specific and idiosyncratic investigation was that at the core of every human being is kind of like a kernel of being, which forms their identity. It seemed to me that this core was what some people call “the inner child”. Now, if it is true that there is such an “inner child” core, this may be why the DSM labels those who are schizoid as well as those who are narcissistic as “sensitive”. I think it is in reference to this relatively undeveloped inner core in the case where someone has a personality disorder. But this is purely theoretical speculation, from the point of view of a different paradigm, which is to say that psychoanalysis is “old school” psychology, and the DSM is the defining new school psychiatry, and the twain do not often meet.
Since what we have here is theoretical speculation, I now resort to another arrow in my quiver, which is introspection and observation. In terms of this I find that cultural groups do indeed have orientations toward the world that can be either predominantly according to a “schizoid” logic (involving denial and repression of emotions), or a narcissistic logic (involving morally unhindered self-promotion). The reason I came to this view was vectored along multiple lines, but to try to illustrate my point, I found that the African author I was studying was often viewed by Western critics in term of the logic of narcissism — that is, he was thought to be angry because he could not self-promote, but from the view of someone sharing the same culture, he was trying to show what lay beneath the surface of political structures. In other words, he was “schizoid” — detached from societal norms, and in suspicion of them, and trying to show that there was a different emotional world beneath the rigid surface of things that everybody else saw.
Anyway, I had a lot of thinking to do about all of these findings and assorted speculations. From my reading of Dambudzo Marchera, but actually also Georges Bataille (a Western philosopher writer, who seems to share a similar schizoid internal logic to Marechera), there is emotion beneath the surface of a schizoid mentality, but the problem is that is cannot be conveyed in language, especially conventional language, because typically the conventional use of words signifies to others what is above the surface of schizoid experience — in other words (haha), it signifies the common range of experience, and the agreed upon nature of human experience, but what cannot be conveyed is the schizoid experience. There is a severance here —i.e. the very problem of “the schizoid”.
Bataille thought that “laughter, tears and forgetting” were nonetheless traces of the authenticity below the public edifice of politically driven control systems. Bataille writes introspectively, but has also read Freud and moves in the same social circles as Lacan (the more recent giant of psychoanalysis). Given that Bataille saw our authenticity as being severed via its in-communicability in language, he writes with a very schizoid sense of psychology. He does admit emotionality, though, as this is what laughter and tears are.
As I have described it, the schizoid has the problem of being separated from conventional meaning, rather than from emotion. This is from a literary criticism point of view, though, not modern psychiatry’s.
As for “sensitivity”, from the viewpoint of my theoretical findings, there is a tendency for people to fit into either a schizoid bracket in terms of their culturally imbued reasoning, or into a narcissistic bracket. The schizoids are uniformly those who have had an authoritarian culture background and parenting, whereas the narcissists have had another kind of background and parenting more suited to modernity. (Indeed, in the case of the latter, the upbringing may have been quite “permissive”.) In both cases, there would be an element of sensitivity in the underlying nature, but it would be expressed quite differently, and with different cultural and personal goals.
Jennifer Armstrong, PhD African Literature & Psychology, The University of Western Australia (2010)
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