Anemone's Research Emporium

Sula Wolff's Loners: Schizoid, autistic or what?

Anemone Cerridwen
April 12, 2009

The book: Sula Wolff, 1995. Loners: The life path of unusual children. Routledge, London.

I read this book some time ago (October, 2008) and am working from notes and memory, so I may be off a bit here and there. Regardless, if this is an issue that bugs you or piques your curiosity, I recommend you check out this book. It is not a long read and I found it an eye opener.

Sula Wolff describes a group of children referred to her clinic over a number of years for adjustment problems in school. They were not obviously autistic, but did have obvious social adjustment problems, which was why they were referred to the clinic. Wolff describes these kids as being solitary, lacking empathy, and being highly sensitive to their own experiences, but not to those of others. Some were preoccupied with their own systems of ideas and differences, some used highly unusual metaphorical language, and some had an unusual fantasy life. Some were outgoing while others were reserved, but they were all natural loners. The male:female ratio was about 3.5:1.

This group of loner children resembled Hans Asperger's description of his original subjects, but most were higher functioning than the children diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by Lorna Wing and Digby Tantam, with a much better outcome in adulthood than Tantam's subjects. They didn't seem to be autistic, or at least most of them didn't seem to be. And yet they resembled the stereotype of the cold unempathic Asperger type better than many people with Asperger's Syndrome do, since most of us don't lack empathy (although it's possible that they didn't either, but just looked like they did). It seems as though their loner-ness was more of a natural personality trait than the result of communication impairments.

Wolff's study raises a lot of questions about diagnostic labels. A few of her subjects would probably qualify for an autistic spectrum diagnosis, but many would not. In addition, their functioning often improved as they entered adult life, and it may be that the problem was that their personalities did not fit into the school system they had to endure, but once they were allowed to do their own thing they were fine. They resembled schizoid personality disorder (at the time; with today's DSM it would be schizoid + schizotypal personality disorders), except that they were children and in general personality disorder labels are reserved for adults. Were they simply a personality type that had adjustment problems in socially conforming school environments? And is schizoid personality disorder a true personality disorder or just a personality type that gets on some people's nerves? If they're basically doing ok in life, then do they need a label at all? It's not as if they're going around hurting people. I wonder how they feel about it. (I think they have their own forums out there somewhere.) Wolff suggested the label "schizoid/Asperger disorder", to be included among the personality disorders. I don't know what to think.

When I did a poll on WrongPlanet back in October, a couple of people identified with the description and did not consider themselves impaired, so would therefore be more schizoid than autistic (at least by my reckoning), while among those who considered themselves impaired as well as weird (and therefore on the autistic spectrum), only about a third identified with this personality description.

So, there are people who have autism and its impairments. And there are people who have schizoid/schizotypal type personality traits. And sometimes people have both. And the stereotype of the schizoid is often applied to all autistics willy-nilly, even though most of the ones I polled did not identify with the description (though some did).

I think what I'm saying is that it is important to distinguish between an "autistic personality" (which many autistic people do not have), and autism the disability. There's enough confusion out there as it is. Let's not make it worse.