The Society of Deviants – Piero Cipriano
Suddenly she asks me the usual question that happens to my colleagues: why did you become a psychiatrist? I don’t know, I answer. Then I think about it, and I ask her why she became a patient. She says: because it’s convenient for me. There you go, I also became a psychiatrist for the same reason.
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The schizoid is rigid in his decisions («when I have decided something, I will do it, no matter what», if it rains and he has decided to go on a mountain hike, he will do it[🡕]). A syntonic person, in contact with the environment, is pliable. He intuits measure and limits. His life can be described with waves. In contrast to the schizoid, whose existence resembles a broken, jagged, sharp line, the empath is himself a living zigzag. And even when the lives of these two poles decline into pathology, this happens because the syntonic person, due to his tendency to vibrate with the environment, to be carried too far, becomes ill with euphoria or melancholy; the schizoid, on the other hand, becomes sick from too much hiding, from too much sheltering from existential storms, protected by an ever-thickening, although transparent, wall of glass, he finally moves away from everything, becomes unreachable, shutting himself away in an ivory tower, and here we have the schizophrenic evolution of the schizoid poet Hölderlin who becomes Scardanelli.