Notes On Some Schizoid Mechanisms 1

TLDR

Early paranoid and schizoid anxieties involve mechanisms that disperse emotions, and when persecutory fear is too strong the ego regresses to a paranoid‑schizoid position, influencing ego development and object relations. Patients exhibit latent anxiety that is maintained by the dispersal mechanism.

Abstract

This chapter explores the importance of early paranoid and schizoid anxieties and mechanisms. For the schizoid mechanisms imply a dispersal of emotions including anxiety, but these dispersed elements still exist in the patient. Such patients have a certain form of latent anxiety; it is kept latent by the particular method of dispersal. For if persecutory fear, and correspondingly schizoid mechanisms, are too strong, the ego is not capable of working through the depressive position. This forces the ego to regress to the paranoid-schizoid position and reinforces the earlier persecutory fears and schizoid phenomena. As regards normal personality, it may be said that the course of ego-development and object-relations depends on the degree to which an optimal balance between introjection and projection in the early stages of development can be achieved. As a consequence, introjection may then be felt as a forceful entry from the outside into the inside, in retribution for violent projection.