Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities

Abstract

Lest it be supposed that I attribute the development of schizophrenia exclusively to certain mechanisms apart from the personality that employs them I shall enumerate now what I think are the preconditions for the mechanisms on which I wish to focus your attention. There is the environment, which I shall not discuss at this time, and the personality, which must display four essential features. These are: a preponderance of destructive impulses so great that even the impulse to love is suffused by them and turned to sadism; a hatred of reality, internal and external, which is extended to all that makes for awareness of it; a dread of imminent annihilation (Klein 1946) and, finally, a premature and precipitate formation of object relations, foremost amongst which is the transference, whose thinness is in marked contrast with the tenacity with which they are maintained. The prematurity, thinness, and tenacity are pathognomonic and have an important derivation, about which I can say nothing today, in the conflict, never in the schizophrenic decided, between the life and death instincts.