PTypes - Solitary Personality Type (Page Two)

PTypes - Personality Types

A Correspondence of Psychiatric, Keirsey, and Enneagram Typologies

Solitary personality type (continued)

Sigmund Freud

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous�to poetry. �Sigmund Freud

Freud's schizoid relationship with his daughter, Anna.

Sigmund Freud disregarded psychoanalytic custom when he chose to psychoanalyze his daughter, Anna, in response to what he termed her 'father-complex'. In Why Freud was Wrong, Richard Webster explains the results of that decision and provides a insight into the schizoid form of relationship:

What is surprising, even in relation to the view of Freud which I have presented in earlier chapters, is his evident failure to understand the human implications of his own decision to take his daughter into analysis. For what he seems not to have grasped is that, in the daily psychoanalytic sessions he held with his daughter, he was steadily intensifying and deepening the very psychological predicament he was consciously seeking to resolve.
So profound was Freud's belief that psychoanalysis was a scientific technique which could be employed objectively in order to achieve medical ends, and so lacking was he in ordinary psychological insight, he appears not to have recognised that in discussing with his twenty-six-year-old daughter her supposed masturbatory fantasies, and her putative sexual fixation on him, he was entering a psychological minefield. Apart from anything else, by showing such an interest in his daughter's sexual imagination, he was clearly transgressing a powerful taboo - and doing so in a manner which evidently gratified his own sexual curiosity. Most people possessed of any degree of ordinary psychological insight would tend intuitively to judge such behaviour as misguided. In the particular circumstances which confront us here, however, it is perhaps worth considering, with rather more care than we generally take, exactly why we might come to such a judgement.
The conventional explanation might very well be that, by behaving in the manner that he did, Freud was sexualising a relationship which, for the psychological well-being of his daughter, should have been kept entirely asexual. There may be a sense in which this is true. But there is also, I believe, an important sense in which it actually inverts the truth. For, in some respects at least, the relationship between father and daughter will always tend to have a sexual dimension. One of the functions of the unwritten rules which govern such relationships is not to suppress this sexual dimension entirely but to allow it to exist, and even flourish, in an area of psychological safety. In a close relationship which is well bounded by such unwritten rules, both father and daughter may, to a certain extent, feel able to express towards one another warm affection, which is quite possibly tinged by sexual attraction, and which can be expressed physically without the danger that the relationship will ever become fully sexual. Written or unwritten rules in this area, as in many other areas of human behaviour, actually serve to safeguard a degree of relative freedom. When such rules are broken, as they evidently were in Freud's analysis of his daughter, the possibility of absolute transgression - of incest - is imaginatively opened up. Because incest is deeply threatening to most people, one of the psychological dangers of such licence is that both father and daughter, unprotected by explicit or implicit rules, will be thrown back onto the resources of the conscience. They may then feel forced to submit to the exacting and cruel demands which the conscience has a tendency to make. Unprotected by an external framework of rules, father and daughter may find themselves obsessively creating an internal framework of inhibition. In doing this there is a great danger that they may empty their relationship of the last traces of emotional warmth and physical affection in an anxious attempt to reassure themselves about their essential virtuousness. In this manner what may appear to be a dangerous attempt to sexualise a relationship, may lead to a cold and conscience-stricken desexualisation of the very bond which was once most warm and affectionate (416-17).

Freud's characterological conflict over needs for closeness and distance.

Psychoanalytic technique can be seen as expressing the needs of a schizoid character. The seemingly cold and uncaring manner that Freud and many psychoanalysts adopted (which has been the subject of much criticism and humor over the years) really originated in Freud's characterological conflict over needs for closeness and distance. Nancy McWilliams (1994) illuminated this dynamic in her defense of the schizoid character:

I do not wish to give the reader the impression that schizoid individuals are cold or uncaring. They may care very much about other people, yet still need to maintain a protective personal space. Some, in fact, gravitate to careers in psychotherapy, where they put their exquisite sensitivity to use safely in the service of others. Allen Wheelis (1956), who may be assumed to be in close touch with his own schizoid characteristics, wrote an eloquent essay on the attractions and hazards of a psychoanalytic career, stressing how people with a core conflict over closeness and distance may be drawn to the profession of analysis, a vocation that offers the opportunity to know others more intimately than anyone else ever will, while concealing the self behind the couch and the neutrality of one's interpretations (196).

Freud required emotional coldness in the analyst.

"I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psychoanalytic treatment on the surgeon who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing his operation as skillfully as possible. Under present-day conditions the feeling that is most dangerous to a psycho-analyst is the therapeutic ambition to achieve by this novel and much disputed method something that will produce a convincing effect on other people.... The justification for requiring this emotional coldness in the analyst is that it creates the most advantageous conditions for both parties: for the doctor a desirable protection for his own emotional life and for the patient the largest amount of help that we can give him to-day" (Source).

The analyst's coolness and distance uncovers and isolates the transference.

From Paul Roazen (1976 pg. 71):

Supposedly, transference, the patient's bond onto the person of the analyst, is made up of idealization as well as suspicion, and is to be traced to the patient's irrational conflicts stemming from the past. By means of the analyst's coolness and distance, the patient is permitted to develop his own fantasies and expectations about the analyst; the analyst's job is then to interpret such transferences, helping the patient to understand his difficulties in terms of his pre-adult past. On the basis of his clinical experience Freud generalized grandly:
It must not be supposed...that transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each person's relations to his human environment.

Freud seems to have projected his schizoid characteristics onto Leonardo da Vinci.

Frederick Crews, a recent critic of Freud, offers this insight:

Perhaps, however, the most interesting insights to be gained from Freud's Leonardo concern not Leonardo but Freud himself. For unlike the story of Leonardo's life, about Freud we know quite a bit. And much of what we know shows that a good deal of what Freud claimed to find characteristic of Leonardo was characteristic of himself: an insatiable curiosity; a great love for his mother; a strong desire for privacy; extreme sexual repression; a very early withdrawal from all sexual activity; an acknowledged "piece of unruly homosexual feeling" and a "pronounced mental bisexuality"; a hesitancy about publishing completed works and a habit of declaring that none of his creations were complete; a rejection of "both dogmatic and personal religion"; and finally, a triumph of creativity "at the very summit of his life" to use Freud's own words in describing Leonardo - Freud was in his early fifties when he wrote the Leonardo study, almost precisely the same age at which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa (210-211).

Crews, Frederick C. (1998). Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend. New York : Viking.

McWilliams, Nancy (1994). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: understanding personality structure in the clinical process. New York: Guilford Press.

Roazen, Paul (1976).Erik H. Erikson: the power and limits of a vision. New York: Macmillan.

Webster, Richard (1956).Why Freud was wrong: sin, science, and psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Wheelis, Allen (1956). The vocational hazards of psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 37, 171-184.

Sigmund Freud - C. George Boeree.

The Burying Freud Web Page

Freudian Links - Links to Freud related resources - archive.org

Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture (Library of Congress Exhibition) [via Google]

Sigmund Freud Links

Remember that it is not merely desire for office and wealth which makes men abject and subservient to others, but desire also for peace, and leisure, and travel, and scholarship. For it makes no difference what the external object be, the value you set upon it makes you subservient to another" —Epictetus, Discourses IV.iv.1-2.

The Solitary Bird

carmelite.com > John of the Cross > Juan de la Cruz
The traits of the solitary bird are five: first, it seeks the highest place; second, it withstands no company; third, it holds its beak in the air; fourth, it has no definite color; fifth, it sings sweetly. These traits must be possessed by the contemplative soul. It must rise above passing things, paying no more heed to them than if they did not exist. It must likewise be so fond of silence and solitude that it does not tolerate the company of another creature. It must hold its beak in the air of the Holy Spirit, responding to his inspirations, that by so doing it may become worthy of his company. It must have no definite color, desiring to do nothing definite other than the will of God. It must sing sweetly in the contemplation and love of its Bridegroom.

Hermit

"Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" - Friedrich Nietzsche.

I hypothesize that the personality theories of personality theorists best describe themselves and those of their own type.

Many people (and not just those of the Solitary personality type) have solitary traits or behave in a solitary manner. But the traits and behaviors of the Solitary personality type are not so inflexible and maladaptive or the cause of such significant subjective distress or functional impairment as to constitute

Schizoid Personality Disorder
The noteworthy examples of the Solitary personality type are examples of a *type*, not of a disorder. It is my opinion that the ideal type which is described above is best characterized as solitary, and that the Solitary personality type represents the pervasive and enduring pattern of the personalities of the people listed below better than any other type.

Famous persons on this list may serve as ego ideals, idealized images, and idols for individuals of the Solitary type.

Activities for the Solitary type

Google Search: solitary activity OR activities

Careers and Jobs for the Solitary type

Google Search: solitary career OR careers

Google Answers: selecting the right career for me

This list represents careers and jobs people of the Solitary type tend to enjoy doing.

strategic planning
writer
staff development
lawyer
architect
software designer
financial analyst
college professor
photographer
logician
artist
systems analyst
neurologist
physicist
psychologist
research/development
...specialist
computer programmer
data base manager
chemist
biologist
investigator

Source: U.S. Department of Interior, Career Manager - INTP.

Idealized Image

I did conceive of "character strengths and virtues" in a positive way as Martin Seligman does in his Positive Psychology, but now see them as images of perfection that inflate the idealized self theorized by Karen Horney.

Character Strengths and Virtues (what the Schizoid type is proud of)

The "Character Strengths and Virtues" are attributes of the idealized self, or ego ideal. As "conditions of worth" they are idols.

Solitude, [silence, recollection].
Independence, [non-attachment], self-containment, autonomous competence, creativity.
Sangfroid, even-tempered, calmness, dispassion, imperturbability, detachment; observation, concentration, clarity of vision, being-informed, science.
Stoicism, indifference, self-control, self-restraint, [altruism, self-sacrifice].
Sexual composure, not passionately sexual.
Feet on the ground, responsibility (Oldham, 275-86).

Top Strengths*

"Curiosity [interest, novelty-seeking, openness to experience]: Taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering"

"Love of learning: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one's own or formally; obviously related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows"

"Persistence [perseverance, industriousness]: Finishing what one starts; persisting in a course of action in spite of obstacles; "getting it out the door"; taking pleasure in completing tasks"

"Fairness: Treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting personal feelings bias decisions about others; giving everyone a fair chance"

"Humility / Modesty Letting one's accomplishments speak for themselves; not regarding oneself as more special than one is"

"Self-regulation [self-control]: regulating what one feels and does; being disciplined; controlling one's appetites and emotions"

"Creativity [originality, ingenuity]: Thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things; includes artistic achievement but is not limited to it

* Selected from Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Claudio Naranjo

Claudio Naranjo - Author's Biography
Claudio Naranjo Links - a hyperlink list of his books.

David Keirsey

Keirsey Temperament and Character Web Site
http://www.keirsey.com/
AdvisorTeam.com - What's Your Personality Type?

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing: A Retrospective

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound [via Google]
Ezra Pound and Roots of Treason by Torrey
The doctors at St. Elizabeths quickly learned that psychological tests weren't going to be of much help. Dr. Torrey reports that ''the Rorschach test was interpreted as suggesting 'a marked personality disorder of long standing.' '' But we also learn that the psychologists could find ''no evidence of psychosis.''

B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner - Dr. C. George Boeree.

Reel People: Cinema's Psychological Personalities

Screenplay Systems : Reel People: The Schizoid Personality - REEL PEOPLE

Personal statements

Message Boards and E-Mail list

Loner Forum: SchizoidCentral@yahoo.com - successor to the discontinued Schizoid Discussion.
This forum is for schizoids and other loners who wish to exchange ideas anonymously.
Enneagram Type 5 Board
Yahoo! Groups: Schizoid

Schizoid personality resource

Solipsists.com [Internet Archive]

Authors

Isaac Asimov Home Page
Dark Icon - Original Fiction - Marc Washington. Visit the Update Log.

Naturalist

Charles Darwin - British Naturalist - Lucidcaf� Library.

Philosophers

Marxism Page [via Brian Harvey]
The Marx/Engels Internet Archive - Karl Marx. [via Google]
Simone Weil - an introduction [via Google]

Physicist

Professor Stephen Hawking's Homepage [via Google]

Psychologist

B. F. Skinner - Group Home Page - "Skinner's Defense of Behaviorism, Classic Works, Animal Learning Theory and Utopian Societies."

Mathematician

Sir Isaac Newton - newton.org.uk [via Google]

Personal Sites

Tim's Virtual Erection.
pHireflY.com Latin Edition - motion collected.
Verbal Bitchsmack

Corresponding Enneagram Type (see Correspondence)

Personality Type Five - "The Five with a Six-Wing."

Bill Gates

The "Unofficial" Bill Gates [via Google]
Life Pattern Profile of Bill Gates: INTP - Terence Duniho. [Internet Archive]
However, the acting "like the teenage boy that he still resembles", the "grins", the "voice breaks", the tucking of "his elbows into his lap" and the rocking back and forth" all fit well with a number of INTPs I have known. But, even more revealing are the quick tantrum bursts. In my experience, none of the other 15 patterns exhibit this truly infantile trait as such a regular part of their makeup.

More Solitary personality type

Movie director

Salon interview - The Savage id: Camille Paglia talks about Hitchcock [via Robot Wisdom]
If I had been asked to rank the great directors in the late '60s, when I entered grad school, I would never have put Hitchcock in the top five; I'd have put him in the top 10, not the top five. Now, as a culture critic, I say at the end of the 20th century that because of his technical innovations and massive influence, Hitchcock for me is the equal of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust and Joyce.
Personality, Pathology, and The Act of Creation: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock
Roger Ebert Reviews: Psycho - Chicago SunTimes. [via my dog wants to be on the radio]
What makes "Psycho" immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers.

Literary characters

Diagnosing The English Patient

Theodore Kaczynski (Bomber)

Steven Reiss (pg. 68) has commented upon Ted Kaczynski's desire for revenge:

People seek revenge for no apparent reason other than the satisfaction of getting even. If you doubt this, look at the words of Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," who moved to a remote area of Montana where he mailed bombs to university professors. Over a period of more than ten years, his bombs killed three people and injured 22 others. In an entry in his diary dated April 6, 1971, he wrote,
My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it....I act merely from a desire for revenge. Of course, I would like to get revenge on the whole scientific and bureaucratic establishment, not to mention the communists and others who threaten freedom, but, that being impossible, I have to content myself with just a little revenge.

Reiss, Steven (2000). Who am I? : the 16 basic desires that motivate our behavior and define our personality. New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

The Unibomber Case - USA Today.
Unibomber Coverage - 1996 with photo - USA Today.
- A personality pushed past the edge - April 15, 1996
  Making bombs in an isolated, one-room shack in remote Montana with no plumbing or electricity is not the behavior of a normal "solitary'' or loner personality, says Dr. John M. Oldham, chief medical officer of the New York State Office of Mental Health. Indeed, the behavior of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber suspect, "is way beyond normal.''
Theodore Kaczynski interview - Time, October 18, 1999. [via metascene]

"I Don't Want To Live Long. I Would Rather Get The Death Penalty Than Spend The Rest Of My Life In Prison"
The Definitive UNABOM Page: Theodore John Kaczynski [via Google]
- Weblog: Definitive UNABOM: News
Unabomber Manifesto, section 1 of 9 by Jorn - "The first of nine segments of Jorn Barger's hypertext rendition of the Freedom Club's so-called Unabomber Manifesto, covering the ways technology deprives us of power over our lives, how people cope, and how scientists cope".
Amazon.com: Books: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist

"The genius in Alston Chase's study of Ted Kaczynski is that he traces the passions, beliefs, and mind-sets that led the Unabomber toward his goal of serially killing people he didn't know. Many of these ideas were imbibed at Harvard, in a Cold War culture that saw only a bleak future. It is Ted Kaczynski's mind that fascinates, especially because so many of his views are those of educated Americans. Just how and why the Unabomber turned these views into a murderous passion is absorbing and compelling reading. Chase's great work, rich with new material about the Unabomber, is worthy of major literary prizes. The book is more than a biography; it is a serious reflection on our times." - Richard S. Wheeler.