ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy is a function of at least three variables: the personality and experience of the therapist, the incentives and the nature of the problems of the patient, and the facilitating or frustrating nature of the environment both materially and personally. If schizoid problems represent a flight from life, oedipal problems represent a struggle to live, and the two types of reaction interact constantly all through life itself and all through psychotherapeutic treatment. With the ever-increasing concentration on the ego, its nature, origins, early development, significance as the core of the human being's 'selfhood as a person', and on the patient's struggle to achieve and preserve a viable ego with which to face the outer world, psychodynamic science emerges as specifically a 'Personality Theory'. The analysis of the schizoid problem must have profound and far-reaching implications for psychotherapy, but only relatively few therapeutic analyses can be carried to that depth.
