The Schizoid Process through R. Erskine’s Regard: “Dialogues and Reflections”

Abstract

The concept of Schizoid Process is one of the most complex and new concepts that Integrative Psychotherapy brings to the psychotherapy world. It was developed and described by R. Erskine (1999, 2020) in his way of comprehending and looking to the human being’s emotional disturbances from a non-pathological point of view and also from his commitment on establishing a way of diagnosing the psychological processes in a useful way in terms of treatment plans and to organise the different stages of the clinical work. This concept gives us the opportunity to approximate at - what Mary O ́Reilly-Knapp (2017) calls “the quiet despair”- with a deep and respectful look. It teaches us to listen its different phases and above anything else, it teaches us how to listen the never verbalised words that are hidden inside the silence (O’Reilly-Knapp, 2001). In this article, we will approximate to this concept trough clinical segments from my own experience as psychotherapist, along with some extracts taken from a series of interviews made to Richard Erskine about the topic. We are going to show here the relevance of the psychotherapist way of looking to the client for the result of the psychotherapy.