THE THIRD face of the basic conflict is the need for detachment, for “moving away from” people. Before examining it in the type for whom it has become the predominant trend, we must understand what is meant by neurotic detachment. Certainly it is not the mere fact of wanting occasional solitude. Everyone who takes himself and life seriously wants to be alone at times. Our civilization has so engulfed us in the externals of living that we have little understanding of this need, but its possibilities for personal fulfillment have been stressed by philosophies and religions of all times. A desire for meaningful solitude is by no means neurotic; on the contrary most neurotics shrink from their own inner depths, and an incapacity for constructive solitude is itself a sign of neurosis. Only if there is intolerable strain in associating with people and solitude becomes primarily a means of avoiding it is the wish to be alone an indication of neurotic detachment.
Certain of the highly detached person’s peculiarities are so characteristic of him that psychiatrists are inclined to think of them as belonging exclusively to the detached type. The most obvious of these is a general estrangement from people. In him this strikes our attention because he particularly emphasizes it, but actually his estrangement is no greater than that of other neurotics. In the case of the two types we have discussed, for instance, it would be impossible to make a general statement as to which was the more estranged. We can only say that this characteristic is covered over in the compliant type, that he is surprised and frightened when he discovers it, because his passionate need for closeness makes him so eager to believe that no gap between himself and others exists. After all, estrangement from people is only an indication that human relationships are disturbed. But this is the case in all neuroses. The extent of the estrangement depends more on the severity of the disturbance than on the particular form the neurosis takes.
Another characteristic that is often regarded as peculiar to detachment is estrangement from the self, that is, a numbness to emotional experience, an uncertainty as to what one is, what one loves, hates, desires, hopes, fears, resents, believes. Such self-estrangement is again common to all neuroses. Every person, to the extent that he is neurotic, is like an airplane directed by remote control and so bound to lose touch with himself. Detached persons can be quite like the zombies of Haitian lore—dead, but revived by witchcraft: they can work and function like live persons, but there is no life in them. Others, again, can have a comparatively rich emotional life. Since such variations exist, we cannot regard self-estrangement, either, as exclusive to detachment. What all detached persons have in common is something quite different. It is their capacity to look at themselves with a kind of objective interest, as one would look at a work of art. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to say that they have the same “on looker” attitude toward themselves that they have toward life in general. They may often, therefore, be excellent observers of the processes going on within them. An outstanding example of this is the uncanny understanding of dream symbols they frequently display.
What is crucial is their inner need to put emotional distance between themselves and others. More accurately, it is their conscious and unconscious determination not to get emotionally involved with others in any way, whether in love, fight, co-operation, or competition. They draw around themselves a kind of magic circle which no one may penetrate. And this is why, superficially, they may “get along” with people. The compulsive character of the need shows up in their reaction of anxiety when the world intrudes on them.
All the needs and qualities they acquire are directed toward this major need of not getting involved. Among the most striking is a need for self-sufficiency. Its most positive expression is resourcefulness. The aggressive type also tends to be resourceful—but the spirit is different; for him it is a prerequisite for fighting one’s way in a hostile world and for wanting to defeat others in the fray. In the detached type the spirit is like Robinson Crusoe’s: he has to be resourceful in order to live. It is the only way he can compensate for his isolation.
A more precarious way to maintain self-sufficiency is by consciously or unconsciously restricting one’s needs. We shall better understand the various moves in this direction if we remember that the underlying principle here is never to become so attached to anybody or anything that he or it becomes indispensable. That would jeopardize aloofness. Better to have nothing matter much. For example: A detached person may be capable of real enjoyment, but if enjoyment depends in any way on others he prefers to forego it. He can take pleasure in an occasional evening with a few friends but dislikes general gregariousness and social functions. Similarly, he avoids competition, prestige, and success. He is inclined to restrict his eating, drinking, and living habits and keeps them on a scale that will not require him to spend too much time or energy in earning the money to pay for them. He may bitterly resent illness, considering it a humiliation because it forces him to depend on others. He may insist on acquiring his knowledge of any subject at first hand: rather than take what others have said or written about Russia, for instance, or about this country if he is a foreigner, he will want to see or hear for himself. This attitude would make for splendid inner independence if it were not carried to absurd lengths, like refusing to ask directions when in a strange town.
Another pronounced need is his need for privacy. He is like a person in a hotel room who rarely removes the “Do-Not-Disturb” sign from his door. Even books may be regarded as intruders, as something from outside. Any question put to him about his personal life may shock him; he tends to shroud himself in a veil of secrecy. A patient once told me that at the age of forty-five he still resented the idea of God’s omniscience quite as much as when his mother told him that God could look through the shutters and see him biting his fingernails. This was a patient who was extremely reticent about even the most trivial details of his life. A detached person may be extremely irritated if others take him “for granted”—it makes him feel he is being stepped on. As a rule he prefers to work, sleep, eat alone. In distinct contrast to the compliant type he dislikes sharing any experience—the other person might disturb him. Even when he listens to music, walks or talks with others, his real enjoyment only comes later, in retrospect.
Self-sufficiency and privacy both serve his most outstanding need, the need for utter independence. He himself considers his independence a thing of positive value. And it undoubtedly has a value of sorts. For no matter what his deficiencies, the detached person is certainly no conforming automaton. His refusal blindly to concur, together with his aloofness from competitive struggle, does give him a certain integrity. The fallacy here is that he looks upon independence as an end in itself and ignores the fact that its value depends ultimately upon what he does with it. His independence, like the whole phenomenon of detachment of which it is a part, has a negative orientation; it is aimed at not being influenced, coerced, tied, obligated.
Like any other neurotic trend, the need for independence is compulsive and indiscriminate. It manifests itself in a hypersensitivity to everything in any way resembling coercion, influence, obligation, and so on. The degree of sensitivity is a good gauge of the intensity of the detachment. What is felt as constraint varies with the individual. Physical pressure from such things as collars, neckties, girdles, shoes may so be felt. Any obstruction of view may arouse the feeling of being hemmed in; to be in a tunnel or mine may produce anxiety. Sensitivity in this direction is not the full explanation of claustrophobia, but it is at any rate its background. Long-term obligations are if possible avoided: to sign a contract, to sign a lease for more than a year, to marry are difficult. Marriage for the detached person is of course a precarious proposition in any event because of the human intimacy involved—although a need for protection or a belief that the partner will completely fit in with his own peculiarities may mitigate the risk. Frequently there is an onset of panic before the consummation of marriage. Time in its inexorableness is for the most part felt as coercion; the habit of being just five minutes late on the job may be resorted to in order to maintain an illusion of freedom. Timetables constitute a threat; detached patients will enjoy the story of the man who refused to look at a timetable and went to the station whenever it happened to suit him, preferring to wait there for the next train. Other persons’ expecting him to do certain things or behave in a certain way makes him uneasy and rebellious, regardless of whether such expectations are actually expressed or merely assumed to exist. For example, he may ordinarily like to give presents, but will forget about birthday and Christmas presents because these are expected of him. To conform with accepted rules of behavior or traditional sets of values is repellent to him. He will conform outwardly in order to avoid friction, but in his own mind he stubbornly rejects all conventional rules and standards. Finally, advice is felt as domination and meets with resistance even when it coincides with his own wishes. Resistance in this case may also be linked with a conscious or unconscious wish to frustrate others.
The need to feel superior, although common to all neuroses, must be stressed here because of its intrinsic association with detachment. The expressions “ivory tower” and “splendid isolation” are evidence that even in common parlance, detachment and superiority are almost invariably linked. Probably nobody can stand isolation without either being particularly strong and resourceful or feeling uniquely significant. This is corroborated by clinical experience. When the detached person’s feeling of superiority is temporarily shattered, whether by a concrete failure or an increase of inner conflicts, he will be unable to stand solitude and may reach out frantically for affection and protection. Vacillations of this kind often appear in his life history. In his teens or early twenties he may have had a few rather lukewarm friendships, but lived on the whole a fairly isolated life, feeling comparatively at ease. He would weave fantasies of a future when he would accomplish exceptional things. But later these dreams were shipwrecked on the rocks of reality. Though in high school he had had undisputed claim to first place, in college he ran up against serious competition and recoiled from it. His first attempts at love relationships failed. Or he realized as he grew older that his dreams were not materializing. Aloofness then became unbearable and he was consumed by a compulsive drive for human intimacy, for sexual relations, for marriage. He was willing to submit to any indignity, if only he were loved. When such a person comes for analytical treatment, his detachment, though still pronounced and obvious, cannot be tackled. All he wants at first is help to find love in one form or another. Only when he feels considerably stronger does he discover with immense relief that he would much rather “live alone and like it.” The impression is that he has merely reverted to his former detachment. But actually it is a matter of being now for the first time on solid enough ground to admit-even to himself—that isolation is what he wants. This would be the appropriate time to work on his detachment.
The need for superiority in the case of the detached person has certain specific features. Abhorring competitive struggle, he does not want to excel realistically through consistent effort. He feels rather that the treasures within him should be recognized without any effort on his part; his hidden greatness should be felt without his having to make a move. In his dreams, for instance, he may picture stores of treasure hidden away in some remote village which connoisseurs come from far to see. Like all notions of superiority this contains an element of reality. The hidden treasure symbolizes his intellectual and emotional life which he guards within the magic circle.
Another way his sense of superiority expresses itself is in his feeling of his own uniqueness. This is a direct outgrowth of his wanting to feel separate and distinct from others. He may liken himself to a tree standing alone on a hilltop, while the trees in the forest below are stunted by those about them. Where the compliant type looks at his fellow man with the silent question, “Will he like me?”—and the aggressive type wants to know, “How strong an adversary is he?” or “Can he be useful to me?”—the detached person’s first concern is, “Will he interfere with me? Will he want to influence me or will he leave me alone?” The scene in which Peer Gynt meets the buttonmolder is a perfect symbolic representation of the terror the detached person feels at being thrown with others. His own room in hell would be all right, but to be tossed into a melting pot, to be molded or adapted to others, is a horrifying thought. He feels himself akin to a rare oriental rug, unique in its pattern and combination of colors, forever unalterable. He takes extraordinary pride in having kept free of the leveling influences of environment and is determined to keep on doing so. In cherishing his unchangeableness he raises the rigidity inherent in all neuroses to the dignity of a sacred principle. Willing and even eager to elaborate his own pattern, to give it greater purity and lucidity, he insists that nothing extrinsic be injected. In all its simplicity and inadequacy the Peer Gynt maxim stands: “To thyself be enough.”
The emotional life of the detached person does not follow as strict a pattern as that of the other types described. Individual variations are greater in his case, chiefly because in contradistinction to the other two, whose predominant trends are directed toward positive goals—affection, intimacy, love in the one; survival, domination, success in the other—his goals are negative: he wants not to be involved, not to need anybody, not to allow others to intrude on or influence him. Hence the emotional picture would be dependent on the particular desires that have developed or been allowed to stay alive within this negative framework, and only a limited number of tendencies intrinsic to detachment as such can be formulated.
There is a general tendency to suppress all feeling, even to deny its existence. I should like to quote here a passage from an unpublished novel of the poet Anna Maria Armi, because it succinctly expresses not only this tendency but also other typical attitudes of the detached person. The main character, reminiscing about his adolescence, says: “I could visualize a strong physical tie (as I had with my father) and a strong spiritual tie (as I had with my heroes), but I could not see where or how feeling came into it; feelings simply didn’t exist —people lied about that as about so many other things. B. was horrified. ‘But how do you explain sacrifice?’ she said. For a moment I was astounded by the truth in her remark; then I decided that sacrifice was just another of the lies, and when it was not a lie it was either a physical or spiritual act. I dreamed at that time of living alone, of never marrying, of becoming strong and peaceful without talking too much, without asking for help. I wanted to work on myself, to be freer and freer, to give up dreams in order to see and live clearly. I thought morals had no meaning; being good or bad made no difference as long as you were absolutely true. The great sin was to look for sympathy or to expect help. Souls seemed to me temples that had to be guarded, and inside them there were always strange ceremonies going on, known only to their priests, their custodians.”
The rejection of feeling pertains primarily to feelings toward other people and applies to both love and hate. It is a logical consequence, of the need to keep at an emotional distance from others, in that strong love or hate, consciously experienced, would bring one either close to others or into conflict with them. H. S. Sullivan’s term, distance machinery, is appropriate here. It does not necessarily follow that feeling will be suppressed in areas outside human relationships and become active in the realm of books, animals, nature, art, food, and so on. But there is considerable danger of this. For a person capable of deep and passionate emotion it may be impossible to suppress only one sector of his feelings —and that the most crucial—without going the whole length of suppressing feeling altogether. This is speculative reasoning, but certainly the following is true. Artists of the detached type, who have demonstrated in their creative periods that they can not only feel deeply but also give expression to it, have often gone through periods, usually in adolescence, of either complete emotional numbness or of vigorous denial of all feeling—as in the passage quoted. The creative periods seem to occur when, following some disastrous attempts at close relationships, they have either deliberately or spontaneously adapted their lives to detachment—that is, when they have consciously or unconsciously determined to keep at a distance from others, or have become resigned to a kind of isolated living. The fact that now, at a safe distance from others, they can release and express a host of feelings not directly connected with human relationships permits the interpretation that the early denial of all feeling was necessary to the achievement of their detachment.
Another reason why the suppression of feeling may go beyond the sphere of human relationships has already been suggested in our discussion of self-sufficiency. Any desire, interest, or enjoyment that might make the detached person dependent upon others is viewed as treachery from within and may be checked on that account. It is as if every situation had to be carefully tested from the standpoint of a possible loss of freedom before feeling could be allowed full play. Any threat of dependence will cause him to withdraw emotionally. But when he finds a situation quite safe in this regard he can enjoy it to the full. Thoreau’s Walden is a good illustration of the profound emotional experience possible under these conditions. The lurking fear of either becoming too attached to a pleasure or of its infringing upon his freedom indirectly will sometimes make him verge on the ascetic. But it is an asceticism of its own kind—not oriented toward self-denial or self-torture. We might rather call it a self-discipline which—accepting the premises—is not lacking in wisdom.
It is of great importance to psychic balance that there be areas accessible to spontaneous emotional experience. Creative abilities, for instance, may be a kind of salvation. If their expression has been inhibited, and if then through analysis or some other experience it is liberated, the beneficent effect upon the detached person can be so great as to make it look like a miraculous cure. Caution is in order in evaluating such cures. In the first place it would be a mistake to make any generalization about their occurrence: what may mean salvation for a detached person will not necessarily have any such meaning for others.1 And even for him it is not strictly a “cure” in the sense of a radical change in neurotic fundamentals. It merely allows him a more satisfactory and less disturbed way of living.
The more the emotions are checked, the more likely it is that emphasis will be placed upon intelligence. The expectation then will be that everything can be solved by sheer power of reasoning, as if mere knowledge of one’s own problems would be sufficient to cure them. Or as if reasoning alone could cure all the troubles of the world!
In view of all we have said about the detached person’s human relationships it will be clear that any close and lasting relation would be bound to jeopardize his detachment and hence would be likely to be disastrous—unless the partner should be equally detached and so of his own accord respect the need for distance, or unless he is able and willing for other reasons to adapt himself to such needs. A Solveig who in loving devotion patiently awaits Peer Gynt’s return is the ideal partner. Solveig expects nothing from him. Expectations on her part would frighten him as much as would loss of control over his own feelings. Mostly he is unaware of how little he himself gives, and he believes he has bestowed his unexpressed and unlived feelings, so precious to himself, upon the partner. Provided emotional distance is sufficiently guaranteed, he may be able to preserve a considerable measure of enduring loyalty. He may be capable of having intense short-lived relationships, relationships in which he appears and vanishes. They are brittle, and any number of factors may hasten his withdrawal.
Sexual relationships may mean inordinately much to him as a bridge to others. He will enjoy them if they are transitory and do not interfere with his life. They should be confined, as it were, to the compartment set aside for such affairs. On the other hand he may have cultivated indifference to so great a degree that it permits of no trespassing. Then wholly imaginary relationships may be substituted for real ones.
All the peculiarities we have described appear in the analytical process. Naturally, the detached person resents analysis because indeed it is the greatest possible intrusion upon his private life. But he is also interested in observing himself and may be fascinated by the greater vista it opens upon the intricate processes going on within him. He may be intrigued by the artistic quality of dreams or by the aptness of his inadvertent associations. His joy in finding confirmation for assumptions resembles the scientist’s. He is appreciative of the analyst’s attention and of his pointing to something here and there, but abominates being urged or “forced” in a direction he has not foreseen. He will often mention the danger of suggestion in analysis—although factually there is less danger of this in his case than for any other type, because he is fully armed against “influence.” Far from defending his position in a rational way by testing out the analyst’s suggestions, he tends, as is his wont, to reject blindly, though indirectly and politely, all that does not fit in with his own ideas about himself and life in general. He finds it particularly obnoxious that the analyst should expect him to change in any way. Of course he wants to get rid of whatever is disturbing him; but it must not involve a change in his personality. He is almost as unfailingly willing to observe as he is unconsciously determined to remain as he is. His defiance of all influence is only one of the explanations for his attitude, and not the deepest one; we shall become acquainted with others later on. Naturally he puts a great distance between himself and the analyst. For a long time the analyst will be only a voice. In dreams the analytical situation may appear as a long-distance call between two reporters on different continents. At first glance a dream like this would seem to express the remoteness he feels toward the analyst and the analytical process—merely an accurate presentation of an attitude that exists consciously. But since dreams are a search for a solution rather than a mere description of existing feelings, the deeper meaning of such a dream is a wish to keep his relationship to the analyst and to the whole analytical process away from him— not to let the analysis touch him in any way.
A final characteristic observable both in the analysis and outside it is the tremendous vigor with which the detachment is defended when attacked. The same might be said of every neurotic position. But the fight in this case seems to be more tenacious, almost a life and death struggle for which all available resources must be mobilized. The battle really starts in a quiet subversive way long before the detachment is attacked. Keeping the analyst out of the picture is one phase of it. If the analyst tries to convince the patient that there is some relationship between them and that something is likely to go on in the patient’s mind on this score, he meets with a more or less elaborate, courteous repudiation. At best the patient will express some rational thoughts he has had about the analyst. If a spontaneous emotional reaction should appear he will not pursue it further. In addition, there is frequently a deep-seated resistance to having anything pertaining to human relationships analyzed. The patient’s relations to others are kept so vague that it is often difficult for the analyst to get any clear picture of them. And this reluctance is understandable. He has preserved a safe distance from others; talking about, the matter could only prove disturbing, upsetting. Repeated attempts to pursue the subject may be met with open suspicion. Does the analyst want to make the patient gregarious? (For him this is beneath contempt.) If at a later period the analyst succeeds in showing him some definite drawbacks to detachment, the patient becomes frightened and irritable. He may think at this point of quitting. Outside analysis his reactions are if anything still more violent. These ordinarily quiet and rational persons may freeze with rage or become actually abusive if their aloofness and independence are threatened. Positive panic may be induced at the thought of joining any movement or professional group where real participation and not merely payment of dues is required. If they do become involved they may thrash about blindly to extricate themselves. They can be more expert in finding methods of escape than a man whose life is attacked. Were the choice between love and independence, as a patient once put it, they would choose independence without hesitation. This brings up another point. Not only are they willing to defend their detachment by every available means, but they find no sacrifice too great in its behalf. External advantages and inner values will be equally renounced—consciously, by setting aside any desire that might interfere with independence, or unconsciously, by automatic prohibition.
Anything so vigorously defended must have an overwhelming subjective value. We can hope to understand the functions of detachment and eventually to be helpful therapeutically only if we are aware of this. As we have seen, each of the basic attitudes toward others has its positive value. In moving toward people the person tries to create for himself a friendly relation to his world. In moving against people he equips himself for survival in a competitive society. In moving away from people he hopes to attain a certain integrity and serenity. As a matter of fact, all three attitudes are not only desirable but necessary to our development as human beings. It is only when they appear and operate in a neurotic framework that they become compulsive, rigid, indiscriminate, and mutually exclusive. This considerably detracts from their value, but does not destroy it.
The gains to be derived from detachment are indeed considerable. It is significant that in all oriental philosophies detachment is sought as a basis for high spiritual development. Of course we cannot compare such aspirations with those of neurotic detachment. There detachment is voluntarily chosen as the best approach to self-fulfillment and is adopted by persons who could, if they wanted, live a different kind of life; neurotic detachment, on the other hand, is not a matter of choice but of inner compulsion, the only possible way of living. Nonetheless, some of the same benefits may be derived from it—though the extent to which this will be so depends on the severity of the whole neurotic process. In spite of the ravaging force of a neurosis, the detached person may preserve a certain integrity. This would hardly be a factor in a society in which human relationships were generally friendly and honest. But in a society in which there is much hypocrisy, crookedness, envy, cruelty and greed, the integrity of a none too strong person easily suffers; keeping at a distance helps to maintain it. Furthermore, since neurosis usually robs a person of his peace of mind, detachment may provide an avenue of serenity, its extent varying with the amount of sacrifice he is willing to make. Detachment allows him, in addition, some measure of original thinking and feeling, provided that within his magic circle emotional life has not been altogether deadened. Lastly, all of these factors, together with his contemplative relation to the world and the comparative absence of distraction, contribute toward the development and expression of creative abilities, if he has any. I do not mean that neurotic detachment is a precondition for creation, but that under neurotic stress detachment will provide the best chance of expressing what creative ability there is.
Substantial though these gains may be, they do not seem to be the main reason why detachment is so desperately defended. Actually the defense is equally desperate if for one reason or another the gains are minimal or are heavily overshadowed by concomitant disturbances. This observation leads into further depths. If the detached person is thrown into close contact with others he may very readily go to pieces or, to use the popular term, have a nervous breakdown. I use the term advisedly here because it covers a wide range of disturbances—functional disorders, alcoholism, suicidal attempts, depression, incapacity for work, psychotic episodes. The patient himself, and sometimes the psychiatrist too, tends to relate the disturbance to some upsetting event that occurred just prior to the “breakdown.” A sergeant’s unjust discrimination, a husband’s philandering and lying about it, a wife’s behaving neurotically, a homosexual episode, unpopularity in college, the need to make a living when life has previously been sheltered, and so on may be held to blame. True enough any such problem is relevant. The therapist should take it seriously and try to understand what in particular was set off in the patient by a specific difficulty. But to do that is hardly sufficient, because the question remains why the patient has been so intensely affected, why his whole psychic equilibrium has been endangered by a difficulty which by and large cannot be considered greater than ordinary frustrations and upsets. In other words, even when the analyst understands how the patient reacted to a particular difficulty, he still needs to understand why there is such a distinct disproportion between the provocation and its effect.
In answer we could point to the fact that the neurotic trends involved in detachment, like other neurotic trends, give the individual a feeling of security as long as they function, and that, conversely, anxiety is aroused when they fail to function. As long as the detached person can keep at a distance he feels comparatively safe; if for any reason the magic circle is penetrated, his security is threatened. This consideration brings us closer to an understanding of why the detached person becomes panicky if he can no longer safeguard his emotional distance from others—and we should add that the reason his panic is so great is that he has no technique for dealing with life. He can only keep aloof and avoid life, as it were. Here again it is the negative quality of detachment that gives the picture a special color, different from that of other neurotic trends. To be more specific, in a difficult situation the detached person can neither appease nor fight, neither co-operate nor dictate terms, neither love nor be ruthless. He is as defenseless as an animal that has only one means of coping with danger—that is, to escape and hide. Appropriating pictures and analogies that have appeared in associations or dreams: he is like the pygmies of Ceylon, invincible so long as they hide in the forests but easily beaten when they emerge. He is like a medieval town protected by one wall only—if that wall is taken, the town is defenseless against the enemy. Such a position fully justifies his anxiety toward life in general. It helps us to understand his remoteness as an over-all protection to which he must tenaciously cling and which he must defend at whatever cost. All neurotic trends are at bottom defensive moves, but the others also constitute an attempt to cope with life in a positive way. When detachment is the predominant trend it renders a person so helpless in any realistic dealing with life that in the course of time its defensive character becomes uppermost.
But the desperateness with which detachment is defended has a further explanation. The threat to detachment, “smashing the wall,” often means more than temporary panic. What may result is a kind of disintegration of personality in psychotic episodes. If in analysis detachment begins to crumble, the patient not only becomes diffusely apprehensive but directly and indirectly expresses definite fears. There may be, for instance, a fear of becoming submerged in the amorphous mass of human beings, a fear, primarily, of losing his uniqueness. There is also the fear of being helplessly exposed to the coercion and exploitation of aggressive persons—a result of his utter defenselessness. But there is still a third fear, that of going insane, which may emerge so vividly that the patient wants positive reassurance against such a possibility. Going insane in this context does not mean going berserk, nor is it a reaction to an emerging wish for irresponsibility. It is a straight expression of the specific fear of being split right open, often expressed in dreams and associations. This would suggest that relinquishing his detachment would bring him face to face with his own conflicts; that he would not be able to survive it but would be split like a tree struck by lightning, to use an image that occurred to a patient. This assumption is confirmed by other observations. Highly detached persons have an almost insurmountable aversion to the idea of inner conflicts. Later they will tell the analyst that they simply didn’t know what he was talking about when he spoke of conflicts. Whenever the analyst succeeds in showing them a conflict operating within themselves, they will imperceptibly and with amazing unconscious skill veer away from the subject. If, inadvertently, before they are ready to admit it, they recognize a conflict in a momentary flash, they are seized with acute panic. When later they approach the recognition of conflicts on a more secure basis, a greater wave of detachment follows.
Thus we arrive at a conclusion that at first glance would have been bewildering. Detachment is an intrinsic part of the basic conflict, but it is also a protection against it. The puzzle resolves itself, however, if we are more specific. It is a protection against the two more active partners in the basic conflict. Here we must reiterate the statement that the predominance of one of the basic attitudes does not prevent the other contradictory ones from existing and operating. We can see this play of forces in the detached personality even more clearly than in the other two groups described. To begin with, the contradictory strivings often show in the life history. Before he has clearly accepted his detachment a person of this type will often have gone through episodes of compliance and dependence as well as through periods of aggressive and ruthless rebellion. In contrast to the clearly defined values of the other two types, his sets of values are most contradictory. In addition to his permanent high evaluation of what he regards as freedom and independence, he may at some time in the analysis express an extreme appreciation for human goodness, sympathy, generosity, self-effacing sacrifice, and at another time swing to a complete jungle philosophy of callous self-interest. He himself may feel puzzled by these contradictions, but with some rationalization or other he will try to deny their conflicting character. The analyst will easily become confused if he has no clear perspective of the whole structure. He may try to follow one path or the other without getting very far in either direction because again and again the patient takes refuge in his detachment, thereby shutting all the gateways as one would shut the water-tight bulkheads of a ship.
There is a perfect and simple logic underlying the special “resistance” of the detached person. He does not want to relate himself to the analyst or to take cognizance of him as a human being. He does not really want to analyze his human relationships at all. He does not want to face his conflicts. And if we understand his premise, we see that he cannot even be interested in analyzing any of these factors. His premise is the conscious conviction that he need not bother about his relations with others so long as he keeps at a safe distance from them; that a disturbance in these relations will not upset him if only he keeps away from others; that even the conflicts of which the analyst speaks can and should be left dormant because they will only bother him; and that there is no need to straighten things out because he will not budge from his detachment anyway. As we have said, this unconscious reasoning is logically correct—up to a point. What he leaves out and for a long time refuses to recognize is that he cannot possibly grow and develop in a vacuum.
The all-important function of neurotic detachment, then, is to keep major conflicts out of operation. It is the most radical and most effective of the defenses erected against them. One of the many neurotic ways of creating an artificial harmony, it is an attempt at solution through evasion. But it is no true solution because the compulsive cravings for closeness as well as for aggressive domination, exploitation, and excelling remain, and they keep harassing if not paralyzing their carrier. Finally, no real inner peace or freedom can ever be attained as long as the contradictory sets of values continue to exist.
1 Cf. Daniel Schneider, “The Motion of the Neurotic Pattern; Its Distortion of Creative Mastery and Sexual Power.” Paper read before the Academy of Medicine, May 26, 1943.