ABSTRACT
The disorders included in this chapter are avoidant, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal. We have chosen to classify these personality disorders, together with schizophrenia, as spacing disorders because they have a major characteristic in common: people with these conditions all have difficulties in forming and maintaining personal relationships and in functioning appropriately as members of a social group. In addition, they tend to deal with these social difficulties by adopting a strategy of withdrawal. Withdrawal effectively removes them from the common social arena of linked interpersonal transactions and puts them in an alternative space of their own making. This alternative, private space may have a geographical location (such as a hermitage, a desert island, a cave, or a monastic cell) or it may have a psychological location – a ‘walled citadel’, so to speak, within themselves. It is true to say, therefore, that people with these disorders have crossed the social boundary which contains all other members of their group, and have moved into ‘outer’ (or ‘inner’) space.
