ABSTRACT
Blackest void prevailed, silent, terrifying beyond imagination, and unknown, for there was none to know it. All infinity, boundlessly yawning with cold velvet vacuum, lay like a sphere, with no surface, whose centre was ungainable since the faster it was approached, the further it receded; but time was not, and nothing was. In the empty stage, a strange threshold softly resolved, imperceptibly slowly but inexorably increasing in strength, warping the very essence of nothingness, and insidiously thickening the void. That is, it aimed to show whether or not the condition of schizoid personality, broadly defined and identified in childhood, could be successfully diagnosed in a group of patients grown-up, by a psychiatrist who had no knowledge of their earlier clinical picture. Because the condition appeared to be so much commoner in boys than girls, only boys were selected for this first study in order to make the sample more uniform.
