through the need to devalue or annihilate others who are perceived as offending, criticising, shaming, or humiliating. This type of superiority was described by a young schizoid man: "If I am superior to others, if I am above others, then I do not need others. When I say that I am above others, it does not mean that I feel better than them, it means that I am at a distance from them, a safe distance." It is a feeling of security rather than of superiority. Loss of affect Guntrip saw loss of affect as inevitable, as the tremendous investment made in the self interferes with the desire and ability to be empathic and sensitive toward another person's experience. These things often seem secondary to securing one's own defensive, safe position. The subjective experience is one of loss of affect. Some patients experience loss of affect to such a degree that the insensitivity becomes manifest in the extreme as cynicism, callousness, or even cruelty. The patient appears to have no awareness of how his or her comments or actions affect and hurt other people. This loss of affect is more frequently manifest within the patient as genuine confusion, a sense of something missing in his or her emotional life. Loneliness Guntrip observed that the preceding characteristics result in loneliness: "Loneliness is an inescapable result of schizoid introversion and abolition of external relationships. It reveals itself in the intense longing for friendship and love which repeatedly break through. Loneliness in the midst of a crowd is the experience of the schizoid cut off from affective rapport." This is a central experience of the schizoid that is often lost to the observer. Contrary to the familiar caricature of the schizoid as uncaring and cold, the vast majority of schizoid persons who become patients express at some point in their treatment their longing for friendship and love. This is not the schizoid patient as described in the DSMs. Such longing, however, may not break through except in the schizoid's fantasy life, to which the therapist may not be allowed access for quite a long period in treatment. There is a very narrow range of classic DSM-defined schizoids for whom the hope of establishing relationships is so minimal as to be almost extinct. The longing for closeness and attachment is almost unidentifiable to such a person. These individuals will not voluntarily become patients, as