Eight

PERSONALITY DISORDERS, NEUROTICISM, AND LONELINESS

1. Neuroticism and Personality Disorders

The lonely are frequently perceived by others and often even by themselves as being mentally sub-par and specifically neurotic in the sense of their manifest- ing ongoing emotional insecurity, fragility, and instability. When extreme, these traits require therapeutic intervention. Unfortunately, neurotics are often not the best at helping themselves find a remedy for the anxiety and other traits that ail them. Moreover, discovering and realizing such an antidote to their afflic- tion are by no means the same thing. The research of Daniel Peplau and Letitia Perlman has found that, first, the lonely “score higher” than the nonlonely in terms of neuroticism; second, that “loneliness is associated with poor mental health” in general; and, third, “structured psychiatric examinations” reveal the lonely as having more “men- tal symptoms needing treatment” than the nonlonely (1984, p. 20). Thomas A. Widiger and Timothy Trull state that those who rank above average in FFM Neuroticism:

lack the emotional strength to simply ignore the hassles of everyday life and the emotional resilience to overcome the more severe traumas which are inevitable at some point within most persons’ lives. Which particular mental disorder they develop may be due in part to other contributing va- riables (for example, gender, social-cultural context, childhood experiences, genetic vulnerabilities, and additional personality traits) which either direct the person toward a preferred method of coping (for example, bulimic, dis- sociative, or substance use behavior) or reflect an additional vulnerability (for example, a sexual dysfunction). (1992, p. 355)

These risk factors negatively impact lonelies’ ability to relate to others and leave them disgruntled with the quantity but especially the quality of their relationships. Hence, the ongoing problem for lonely people is ordinarily tra- ceable to their personality features—meaning trait, or endogenous, loneliness in contrast to state, or exogenous, loneliness. Many of these qualities are highly neurotic in nature, including an overall vulnerability itself. This rather ubiquitous if not universal risk factor leaves the lonely sus- ceptible to (dis)stress and the inability to deal with daily difficulties, all of which are germane to existential and other forms of negative aloneness. Though not all lonely people are neurotic, many are, but even more is the re- 238 PERSONALITY DISORDERS AND STATES OF ALONENESS verse the case, such that neurotics tend to be lonely and usually significantly so, depending on the number, the mixture, and severity of their neurotic traits. Neuroticism is the only FFM supertrait that is intrinsically negative. Al- ternatively, the other four FFM domains, namely Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, and especially Humaneness, imply the posi- tive, as do their very names. The combination of Humaneness and Extraver- sion, especially its traits of warmth, gregariousness, and positive emotions, are the most indicative not only of health in all its forms, namely physical, mental, and spiritual, but of happiness. This singular state of joy and serenity substan- tially eludes the neurotic and the lonely, above all the neurotically lonely. With respect to the personality abnormalities, the absolute loners of Group I are a mixture of extreme Neuroticism, the schizotypal, and extreme non-Neuroticism, the schizoid, the most non-neurotic of the ten aberrated personalities. The neurotic is characterized by negative emotionality; howev- er, the schizoid is devoid of much if any affect whatsoever (Costa and Widig- er, 2002, p. 461). In being emotionally cold, flat, and detached or, more accurately, non-attached, this aberrant is less functionally human than neurot- ics (all individuals are equally human in their essential structures). Hence, this absence of affect renders the schizoid more pathological than the highly neu- rotic individual who has a propensity to be exceedingly emotionally driven. Even when an individual’s emotions are negative, they are better psy- cho-ethically, all things considered, than the radical incapability of experienc- ing almost any emotion as in the case of the archetypal schizoid. At least the presence of neurotic emotionality implies a kind of vitality, whereas its non- presence suggests a kind robotic-like condition. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the schizoid leads a zombie-like existence, in which case an individu- al is alive yet dead to the inner and outer worlds. Schizotypals are, save for Group III aberrants as a whole, the most neu- rotic of the pathological personalities. Schizotypals are so specifically in terms of the Neuroticism traits of anxiety, self-consciousness, depressiveness, and vulnerability but not angry hostility toward others (and self) and impul- sivity, arguably the two most negative traits of this FFM supertrait. So con- ceived, the schizotypal mirrors the Neuroticism of the relative loner, the avoidant of Group III (ibid.; 1994, p. 329). However, the focal points of these two neurotic aberrants critically dif- fer since, unlike the avoidant’s, the schizotypal’s contain little if any desire for being attached. Furthermore, the avoidant, unlike the schizotypal, is not on the so-called schizophrenic spectrum. On what may be titled “the neurotic spectrum,” I would argue that the avoidant is the least neurotic with the bor- derline being the most and also being the most prone to psychotic symptoms after the schizotypal and schizoid. Though schizoids are the least neurotic of all the abnormal personalities, they are the most purely psychologically disturbed of them. For one thing, these total loners are the most negatively integrated of the abnormals. For