ABSTRACT
The psychotherapist must be greatly concerned with those states of mind in which patients become inaccessible emotionally, when the patient seems to be bodily present but mentally absent. 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. The psychoneuroses are, basically, defences against internal bad-object situations which would otherwise set up depressive or schizoid states; though these situations are usually re-activated by a bad external situation. The depressive position is later and more developed than the schizoid, for it is ambivalent. The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort.
