Individual differences explanation - psychodynamic

• Fixation 

  During the oral stage of psychosexual development, the libido receives satisfaction from stimulation of the lips and mouth. Most of the time the libido's urges are satisfied by feeding from the mother's breast. However if an infant receives too much or too little oral stimulation during this phase, they may become fixated. Freud proposed that individuals with schizophrenia become fixated during the first one to two months of the oral stage of development.
• If an individual with this oral fixation encounters an excessive amount of stress, they may regress back to this early stage, and the schizophrenic becomes essentially like a new-born again.
• • The mind of an infant
  • All id. No ego or superego present
  • The infant is self-centred, and with no ego to keep the id in check, the infant is focused on their own gratification with no care for others
  • As an adult, they would be narcissistic and impulsive, unable to plan their actions (no ego) and unable to see if their behaviour was immoral (no superego)
  • The lack of an ego would also make it difficult for someone to engage with reality
• • Freud argues that schizophrenics regress back to a new born state
  • Focused on the self
  • Disengaged from reality and inward focusing
• • Detachment from reality combined with an active adult mind:
  • Creation of alternative realities that are not part of the world
  • No ego, so self-obsessed, narcissistic behaviour, delusion of grandeur etc.
• • Attachments to the world are reinvested in the fabricated existence (hallucinations and delusions)
  • Schizophrenics attempt to recover a sort of normality.  
  • They have the need to interact with something external to oneself, but combined with a distrust of all that is real leads to the necessity to create an alternative reality (for example hearing voices or seeing people that are not real). 
• Regression 

  As an adult, most people satisfy any oral desires (from their libido) through activities such as kissing, smoking, chewing gum, etc. However if, as an adult, an individual experiences excessive amounts of stress the individual may indeed regress back to the oral stage. Regression is an ego defence mechanism which causes the ego to retreat back to an earlier stage (specifically the oral stage for schizophrenia). This may just be temporary or may continue over the long term. 
• Losing touch with reality 

  During the oral stage, the ego is not well developed. The role of the ego is to control the id's impulses and to try to balance the demands of the id with the moral limitations imposed by the superego. However if an individual regresses back to a point where the ego effectively doesn't exist, there is nothing stopping the id from operating completely unimpeded.  
• Schizophrenogenic mother 

  Psychodynamic theorists consider the mother-child relationship to be one of the crucial factors in the development of schizophrenia. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1948) wrote 'The schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people due to the severe early warp and rejection he encountered in important people in his infancy and childhood, as a rule mainly in a schizophrenogenic mother! 
• This concept proposes that the mothers of individuals who develop schizophrenia are overprotective and controlling but at the same time rejecting and distant. The mother's overprotection stifles the child's emotional development, while her emotional distance deprives the child of personal security, thereby leaving an individual who is very vulnerable when faced with stress.
• Some studies suggested that the mother-child relationship was disordered in cases where the child was schizophrenic (Lidz and Lidz, 1949).