Henry James Samuel Guntrip (29 May 1901 – 1975) was a British psychoanalyst known for his major contributions to object relations theory or school of Freudian thought.
[1][2] He was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a psychotherapist and lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, Leeds University, and also a Congregationalist minister.
Guntrip's Personality Structure and Human Interaction organised, critiqued and synthesised the theories of major psychoanalysts, including Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint.
[4][5] Guntrip worked extensively with schizoid patients who were detached, withdrawn, and unable to form meaningful human relations.
He delineated the following nine characteristics of the schizoid personality: introversion, withdrawnness, narcissism, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalisation, and regression.[6]: pp.
Only a small portion of schizoid individuals present with a clear and obvious timidity, reluctance, or avoidance of the external world and interpersonal relationships.
Such a person can appear to be available, interested, engaged and involved in interacting with others, but he or she may in reality be emotionally withdrawn and sequestered in a safe place in an internal world.
[6] Guntrip saw loss of affect as inevitable,[7] as the tremendous investment made in the self interferes with the desire and ability to be empathic and sensitive toward another person's experience.
[6] Some patients experience loss of affect to such a degree that the insensitivity becomes manifest in the extreme as cynicism, callousness, or even cruelty.
Depersonalization is a dissociative defence, often described by the schizoid patient as "tuning out", "turning off", or as the experience of a separation between the observing and the participating ego.
[6] Guntrip defined regression as "Representing the fact that the schizoid person at bottom feels overwhelmed by their external world and is in flight from it both inwards and as it were backwards to the safety of the metaphorical womb.
Regression inward speaks to the magnitude of the reliance on primitive forms of fantasy and self-containment, often of an autoerotic or even objectless nature.
Regression backwards to the safety of the womb is a unique schizoid phenomenon and represents the most intense form of schizoid defensive withdrawal in an effort to find safety and to avoid destruction by external reality, which has been conflated with the challenging parental models faced by the subject following exit from the womb upon physical birth.