“The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“In essence, schizoid personality disorder is overtly characterized by social withdrawal, interpersonal detachment, solitariness in vocational and recreational choices, asexuality, idiosyncratic morality, and absentmindedness. Covertly, however, the schizoid individual is exquisitely sensitive, emotionally needy, acutely observant, creative, often perverse, and vulnerable to corruption. The avoidance of and the need for others, the callous persona and the inner sensitivity, and the absent-mindedness and vigilance are various facets of the same condition. The tension between these extremes is the heart of the schizoid pathology.”
― Salman Akhtar, Quest for Answers: A Primer of Understanding and Treating Severe Personality Disorders

“A man with strongly, in fact exclusively, religious interests, showed markedly this characteristic of helping people without really feeling for them. He said: 'I've no real emotional relations with people. I can't reciprocate tenderness. I can cry and suffer with people. I can help people, but when they stop suffering I'm finished. I can't enter into folks' joys and laughter. I can do things for people but shrink from them if they start thanking me.' His suffering with people was in fact his identifying himself as a suffering person with anyone else who suffered. Apart from that he allowed no emotional relationship to arise.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“We may finally summarize the emotional dilemma of the schizoid thus: he feels a deep dread of entering into a real personal relationship, i.e. one into which genuine feeling enters, because, though his need for a love-object is so great, he can only sustain a relationship at a deep emotional level on the basis of infantile and absolute dependence. To the love-hungry schizoid faced internally with an exciting but deserting object all relationships are felt to be 'swallowing-up things' which trap and imprison and destroy. If your hate is destructive you are still free to love because you can find someone else to hate. But if you feel your love is destructive the situation is terrifying. You are always impelled into a relationship by your needs and at once driven out again by the fear either of exhausting your love-object by the demands you want to make or else losing your own individuality by over-dependence and identification. This 'in and out' oscillation is the typical schizoid behaviour, and to escape from it into detachment and loss of feeling is the typical schizoid state.
The schizoid feels faced with utter loss, and the destruction of both ego and object, whether in a relationship or out of it. In a relationship, identification involves loss of the ego, and incorporation involves a hungry devouring and losing of the object. In breaking away to independence, the object is destroyed as you fight a way out to freedom, or lost by separation, and the ego is destroyed or emptied by the loss of the object with whom it is identified. The only real solution is the dissolving of identification and the maturing of the personality, the differentiation of ego and object, and the growth of a capacity for cooperative independence and mutuality, i.e. psychic rebirth and development of a real ego.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“In his last book, in 2005, Masterson does touch upon a variation of the abandonment depression in ’the three primary cornerstones of character work.’ For the borderline, a sense of abandonment arises from a question of ’competence’; for the narcissist, ’painful vulnerability’ rests on a sense of deep imperfection; and for the schizoid, there is ’danger’ in the possibility of not being able to make any connection at all.”
― Candace Orcutt, The Unanswered Self: The Masterson Approach to the Healing of Personality Disorder

“The oscillation of 'in and out', 'rushing to and from', 'holding on and breaking away' is naturally profoundly disturbing and disruptive of all continuity in living, and at some point the anxiety aroused becomes so great that it cannot be sustained. It is then that a complete retreat from object relations is embarked on, and the person becomes overtly schizoid, emotionally inaccessible, cut off. This state of emotional apathy, of not suffering any feeling, excitement or enthusiasm, not experiencing either affection or anger, can be very successfully masked. If feeling is repressed, it is often possible to build up a kind of mechanized, robot personality. The ego that operates consciously becomes more a system than a person, a trained and disciplined instrument for 'doing the right and necessary thing' without any real feeling entering in.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“The majority of schizoids are not either over sensitive or cold but they are over sensitive and cold at the same time in quite different relative proportions.”
― Ernst Kretschmer, Physique And Character: An Investigation Of The Nature Of Constitution And Of The Theory Of Temperament

“Premature as well as retarded awakening of the sexual impulses is not a rare phenomenon among schizoids.”
― Ernst Kretschmer, Physique And Character: An Investigation Of The Nature Of Constitution And Of The Theory Of Temperament

“Even those schizoid people who are confident of the superiority of their perceptions are not indifferent to the effect they may have in alienating others.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process