Author — A.P. Egides. The book «How to understand people, or the Psychological drawing of personality»
The creativity of the schizoid does not provide for a momentary and even just a result calculated for the near future. So Heron saw hundreds of years ago that a kettle hanging over a fire deviates in the direction opposite to the steam jet. He turned the spout of the kettle from vertical (in relation to the wall of the kettle) to a horizontal position — the kettle spun over the fire. We now understand that this is jet propulsion.
And Korolev used Heron’s idea for rockets — you can’t imagine a more pragmatic one. But it came up after many hundreds of years.
So schizoids create for the future. Factory technologies are scooped from the bank of their eternal ideas today.
The creativity of schizoids, as it were, is in free flight. It hovers freely from topic to topic, from association to association. The process of creative thinking is continuous … Their insights are not as bright, schizoids do not attach such importance to them as paranoid ones. But these conjectures are many, they twinkle like stars far from us, and someday, even if not very soon, they will be used by pragmatists.
The schizoid does not create for humanity, but for himself and for the same smart people. Therefore, he often creates «on the table», does not show anyone: he is interested, and that’s it. He does not need to move mountains, he does not need to push classes, masses, estates against each other, he does not need to conquer countries, and he does not even need to “win friends”. In the extreme case, the schizoid believes, a meticulous historian of science will pull out tomes into the light of day and find there the diamonds of his, the schizoid, ideas. This hysteroid is unbearable to create on the table.
At the same time, the creativity of the schizoid is often irresponsible. He is interested in the idea in its purest form, and he not only quenches his own thirst for knowledge and creates at the expense of the people and the state, but can also do things.
Let’s take such a product of schizoid geniuses as transplantology, supposedly intended to save people. But who does not know that transplantology is the transplantation of organs from the poor to the rich? And the schizoids are like children in the song of Vadim Egorov: “There is such a powder, it’s good to take off with it, it’s called gunpowder.” So they invent the ferris wheels, and then everyone takes off because of them, and not into the air, but into a completely airless space. (Let us also think about Bulgakov’s fictional professor Persikov in Fatal Eggs and about the non-fictional Teller and Oppenheimer with the development of the atomic bomb.)
We have already said that the results of the creativity of brilliant schizoids can fall into the hands of psychopathic politicians. What would happen if Heisenberg «just in time» made an atomic bomb for Hitler? But Heisenberg only pretended to create it. We owe him a relatively favorable outcome of the war. He well understood that «Genghis Khan with a telegraph is more terrible than Genghis Khan without a telegraph.» This phrase belongs to Herzen, who was not yet aware of the division of people into schizoids, paranoid and others …
The main thing in the work of the schizoid is paradoxicality. «And genius is a friend of paradoxes.» What is a paradox? “It seemed so, but it turned out so!” And it seemed to the majority, almost everyone, and even just everyone.
- After all, it was once clear to everyone that the Sun revolves around the Earth. It’s so simple: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. How could one think differently if the Sun is one (it is even more difficult to assume that there are many of them). And schizoid Copernicus, contrary to the overwhelming majority, it became clear that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
- Everyone seems to understand that happiness lies in having. And Fromm understood: happiness lies in being (and he shows that this is indeed the case).
- It seemed to everyone that our psyche is controlled by consciousness, and Freud proved that very often consciousness is ruled by the unconscious.
- Everyone believes that civilization is good, and Rousseau called back to nature. Everyone believed that knowledge is power, and Ecclesiastes believed that “in much wisdom there is much sorrow, and whoever increases knowledge, increases sorrow.”
In this vein, I reinterpreted the quoted phrase of Ecclesiastes as follows: in much sorrow there is much wisdom (it turned out, as it were, a paradox based on a paradox).
Everyone believed that suffering is bad, and Frankl convinces that a deep understanding of life is born in suffering.
In this book, as the reader is convinced, my paradoxical statements also flash, for example, about the paranoid one: “a new friend is better than the old two”; or about a psychasthenoid: “he will measure seven times and never cut off”; about the hysteroid: «sin to repent.»
The paradoxical nature of the schizoid manifests itself not only in abstract scientific and philosophical work, but also in technical. He, of course, does not hammer nails with a microscope, but he can very well use something not by chance. Remember, in The Mysterious Island, the professor made a lens out of two watch glasses and kindled a fire.
And the same is true in art. Do this experiment. Ask to find epithets for the word «bones». You will be given many options. There will be “white”, and “black”, and “playing”, and “fish”, and “tu.e.atye”, and even “rotten”. But only a brilliant poet found the phrase “noble bones” (“And he sees: on a hill, near the banks of the Dnieper, noble bones lie”).
Schizoid creativity in literature is sometimes striking in its gloomy fantasy. This is not naive Jules Verne with the adventures of Captain Nemo or the search for Captain Grant. This is the cold and frightening world of Wells’ novels, with his Morlocks and Eloi, with the torment of the invisible man. This is the ponderous mathematics of Borges’ stories. Read his «Aleph» and again «Immortal».