My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Patients with schizoid personality disorder, or schizoids for short, enjoy nothing. They seemingly never experience pleasure. This is known as anhedonia. Even their nearest interiors describe them as automata, robots, or machines.
But the schizoid is not depressed or dysphoric. He is merely indifferent. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships, and they are bored and puzzled by interpersonal reactions and interactions. They are incapable of intimacy, and they have a very limited range of emotions and affect.
Rarely does the schizoid express feelings, either negative, such as anger, or positive, such as happiness. Schizoids never pursue an opportunity to develop a close relationship.
Schizoids are mostly aloof, bland, stunted, flat, and zombie-like. Sexually, they are neutered. They derive no satisfaction from belonging to a close-knit group, a family, a church, workplace, neighborhood, or nation. They rarely marry or have children.
Schizoids are loners. Given the option, they invariably pursue solitary activities or hobbies. Inevitably, they prefer mechanical or abstract tasks and jobs that require such skills and are grounded, belongeless, in the isolation that they seek.
Many computer hackers, crackers, and programmers are schizoids, for instance, as are some mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
Schizoids are inflexible in their reactions to changing life circumstances and developments, both adverse and opportune. Faced with stress, schizoids may disintegrate, decompensate, and experience brief psychotic episodes or even a depressive illness.
Schizoids have few friends or confidence. They trust only first-degree relatives, but even so, they maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family.
Schizoids pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement, and corrective advice, though deep inside, they are not.
These are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable, and narrowly restricted routines and schedules.
From the outside, the schizoid’s life looks rather less and adrift.
Like people with Asperger’s syndrome, schizoids fail to respond appropriately to social cues and rarely reciprocate gestures or facial expressions such as smiles.
As the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual puts it, schizoids seem socially inept or superficial and self-absorbed.
Be sure to watch the video which compares narcissists to schizoids. It is available in my channel.
