Harry Guntrip > Quotes

“Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“There cannot be a whole complete human being without an integration of feeling with thinking and acting, provided by ‘doing’, arising spontaneously out of the fundamental experience of ‘being’.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“A man with strongly, in fact exclusively, religious interests, showed markedly this characteristic of helping people without really feeling for them. He said: 'I've no real emotional relations with people. I can't reciprocate tenderness. I can cry and suffer with people. I can help people, but when they stop suffering I'm finished. I can't enter into folks' joys and laughter. I can do things for people but shrink from them if they start thanking me.' His suffering with people was in fact his identifying himself as a suffering person with anyone else who suffered. Apart from that he allowed no emotional relationship to arise.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“We may finally summarize the emotional dilemma of the schizoid thus: he feels a deep dread of entering into a real personal relationship, i.e. one into which genuine feeling enters, because, though his need for a love-object is so great, he can only sustain a relationship at a deep emotional level on the basis of infantile and absolute dependence. To the love-hungry schizoid faced internally with an exciting but deserting object all relationships are felt to be 'swallowing-up things' which trap and imprison and destroy. If your hate is destructive you are still free to love because you can find someone else to hate. But if you feel your love is destructive the situation is terrifying. You are always impelled into a relationship by your needs and at once driven out again by the fear either of exhausting your love-object by the demands you want to make or else losing your own individuality by over-dependence and identification. This 'in and out' oscillation is the typical schizoid behaviour, and to escape from it into detachment and loss of feeling is the typical schizoid state.
The schizoid feels faced with utter loss, and the destruction of both ego and object, whether in a relationship or out of it. In a relationship, identification involves loss of the ego, and incorporation involves a hungry devouring and losing of the object. In breaking away to independence, the object is destroyed as you fight a way out to freedom, or lost by separation, and the ego is destroyed or emptied by the loss of the object with whom it is identified. The only real solution is the dissolving of identification and the maturing of the personality, the differentiation of ego and object, and the growth of a capacity for cooperative independence and mutuality, i.e. psychic rebirth and development of a real ego.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“The antilibidinal ego will snatch everything away if it can: analysis, friends, religious comforts, creative activities, marriage, and we need to be able to determine the exact source of its power, remembering that it is not an entity per se but one aspect of the patient's total, if divided, self, and withal to be respected as his genuine struggle to keep his ego in being, originally in the absence of all help.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“The oscillation of 'in and out', 'rushing to and from', 'holding on and breaking away' is naturally profoundly disturbing and disruptive of all continuity in living, and at some point the anxiety aroused becomes so great that it cannot be sustained. It is then that a complete retreat from object relations is embarked on, and the person becomes overtly schizoid, emotionally inaccessible, cut off. This state of emotional apathy, of not suffering any feeling, excitement or enthusiasm, not experiencing either affection or anger, can be very successfully masked. If feeling is repressed, it is often possible to build up a kind of mechanized, robot personality. The ego that operates consciously becomes more a system than a person, a trained and disciplined instrument for 'doing the right and necessary thing' without any real feeling entering in.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“Academic psychology has developed, in its modern methods of personality testing for diagnostic purposes, a skilfully impersonal way of dealing with personality, by means of which, once more, human beings can be classified and categorized without anyone ever coming into intimate personal human rapport with the patient as a meaningful individual in his own right.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“When science begins to treat man as an object of investigation, it somehow loses him as a person.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“What is the fundamental fact that remains a constant, whether overt or disguised, in all abnormally developed types of personality ? Is it not that so far as emotions are concerned such people live their outward life in terms of inner subjective factors. Their emotional relationships with their outer world are not objectively realistic. They may be intellectually objective in the matter of their correct appraisal of ways and means to their own ends, and in relation to matters that are of no private emotional significance to them. But the moment their personal needs and aims are involved they lose emotional objectivity and behave on the basis of inner mental situations. All patients live in an individual private mental world and to help them we have to discover its structure.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“We do not have first of all an individual, fully formed and neat and complete in himself, and then a group set up by the bringing together of a number of these self-contained individuals. Rather, the group goes into the making and structure of the individual while, pari passu, individuals in their personal relationships are constituting the group. Individuals and groups are mutually constitutive in highly complex ways as is shown by the psychodynamic study of human object-relationships.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“The child who finds his outer world frustrating turns inwards, and he turns his own mind into 'a place to live in' instead of using it as 'an active function to live with'. He starts doing his living in imagination, in phantasy, not in fact. He peoples his inner world with good and bad objects whom he hopes he can manipulate at will. He seeks what he wants inside in phantasied satisfactions. This is based on the capacity to hallucinate satisfactions so vividly (as in dreams) that emotionally they can substitute for a time for outer reality. Unfortunately, in this process, he sets up 'bad' as well as 'good' figures inside, and perpetuates disturbance. The inner world then becomes the enduring though repressed and unconscious structure of the dynamic personality, which is filled with conflict and self-frustration. Over the top of this at the level of consciousness, a superficial personality constructed mainly of social adjustments, and functioning without much real mature feeling, carries on the business of outer life in a way that is far more automatic than is usually recognized.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“The fact is, however, that in a human being every psychic process is a personal activity, and that the neo-Freudian development of Freud's theory of the super-ego expresses the fact that the human environment does not remain a wholly external repressing force impinging on a unitary organism only from the outside : rather it comes to be psychically internalized in such a way as to form the endopsychic structure of a personality. Thus, in the long run, the intimate traumatic situations in which the individual suffers are no longer outside but are embedded in the personality itself.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory