Exploring the Schizoid Defense of the Closet Through the Existential–Phenomenology of R. D. Laing

Abstract

This article applies the existential-phenomenological analysis of schizoid persons in R. D. Laing's The Divided Self to the phenomenology of closeted gay individuals, as described by various autoethnographies and memoirs about the lived experience of being in the closet. It explores how schizoid and closeted gay individuals employ similar defenses and suffer similar traumas as they attempt to survive within a persecutory social world. The purpose of this comparison is to help psychologists gain understanding of what beingin-the-world is like for members of a marginalized population who lack a world in which it is safe to really be. Psychologists are thereby invited to question mainstream assumptions about clinical diagnoses and to consider reframing individual psychopathology as social pathology, particularly among patients whose psychic distress may be symptomatic of the daily trauma of trying to conform to hostile sociocultural contexts that enforce oppressive social norms.