Harry Guntrip

Harry Guntrip (1901–1975) was a psychologist known for his major contributions to object relations theory or school of Freudian thought. He was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a psychotherapist and lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, Leeds University, and also a Congregationalist minister. He was described by Dr. Jock Sutherland as "one of the psychoanalytic immortals".

Guntrip’s Personality Structure and Human Interaction organized, critiqued and synthesized the theories of major psychoanalysts, including Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint. Although he accepted many of Freud's theories, he also advanced his own ideas and criticized Freud as being too based on biology in general, and instincts in particular, and therefore being, in Guntrip's belief, dehumanizing. He also drew heavily on the object relational approach of Fairbairn and Winnicott. He argued that the regressed ego, which is perhaps his greatest contribution to psychoanalysis, exerts a powerful effect on life. He viewed the schizoid sense of emptiness as reflecting the withdrawal of energy from the real world into a world of internal object relations.

His personal symptoms led him to be psychoanalysed by both W.R.D. Fairbairn and D.W. Winnicott. Although helpful, the therapy did not cure his problem.

Guntrip worked extensively with schizoid patients who were detached, withdrawn, and unable to form meaningful human relations. He came to regard the self as the fundamental psychological concept, psychoanalysis as the study of its growth, and psychoanalytic therapy as a means of providing a personal relationship in which the alienated, withdrawn self is given an opportunity for healthy growth and development, and finally putting it in touch with other persons and objects.

He delineated the following nine characteristics of the schizoid personality: introversion, withdrawnness, narcissism, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalization, and regression. These are described in more detail below.

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