/schizoid/ - Schizoid Personality Discussion Group

this shut up self, being isolated, is unable to be enriched by outer experience, and so the whole inner world comes to be more and more impoverished, until the individual may come to feel he is merely a vacuum. The sense of being able to do anything and the feeling of possessing everything then exist side by side with a feeling of impotence and emptiness. The individual who may at one time have felt predominantly 'outside' the life going on there, which he affects to despise as petty and commonplace compared to the richness he has here inside himself, now longs to get inside life again, and get life inside himself, so dreadful is his inner deadness'
- The Divided Self - R D Laing