People with SPD are often aloof, cold and indifferent, which causes interpersonal difficulty. Most individuals diagnosed with SPD have trouble establishing personal relationships or expressing their feelings meaningfully. They may remain passive in the face of unfavorable situations. Their communication with other people may be indifferent and terse at times.<unk>  personality types often lack the ability to assess the impact of their own actions in social situations. A person with SPD may feel suffocated when their personal space is violated and take actions to avoid this feeling. People who have SPD tend to be happiest when in relationships in which their partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them and does not expect phatic or social niceties. It is not necessarily people they want to avoid, but negative or positive emotional expectations, emotional intimacy and self-disclosure. Therefore, it is possible for individuals with SPD to form relationships with others based on intellectual, physical, familial, occupational or recreational activities, as long as there is no need for emotional intimacy. Donald Winnicott explains this is because<unk>  individuals "prefer to make relationships on their own terms and not in terms of the impulses of other people." Failing to attain that, they prefer isolation. In general, friendship among<unk> s is usually limited to one person, often also<unk> , forming what has been called a union of two eccentrics; "within it – the ecstatic cult of personality, outside it – everything is sharply rejected and despised". Although there is the belief people with<unk>  are complacent and unaware of their feelings, many recognize their differences from others. Some individuals with SPD who are in treatment say "life passes them by" or they feel like living inside a shell; they see themselves as "missing the bus" and speak of observing life from a distance. Aaron Beck and his colleagues report that people with SPD seem comfortable with their aloof lifestyle and consider themselves observers, rather than participants in the world around them. But they also mention that many of their<unk>  patients recognize themselves as socially deviant (or even defective) when confronted with the different lives of ordinary people – especially when they read books or see movies focusing on relationships. Even when<unk>  individuals may not long for closeness, they can become weary of being "on the outside, looking in". These feelings may lead to depression or depersonalization. If they do,<unk>  people often experience feeling "like a robot" or "going through life in a dream". According to Guntrip, Klein and others, people with SPD may possess a hidden sense of superiority and lack dependence on other people's opinions. This is very different from the grandiosity seen in narcissistic personality disorder, which is described as "burdened with envy" and with a desire to destroy or put down others. Additionally,<unk> s do not go out of their way to achieve social validation. Unlike the narcissist, the<unk>  will often keep their creations private to avoid unwelcome attention or the feeling that their ideas and thoughts are being appropriated by the public. The related schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia are reported to have ties to creative thinking, and it is speculated that the internal fantasy aspect of<unk>  may also be reflective of this thinking. Alternatively, there has been an especially large contribution of people with<unk>  symptoms to science and theoretical areas of knowledge, including maths, physics, economics, etc. At the same time, people with SPD are helpless at many practical activities due to their symptoms. Secret<unk> s Many<unk>  individuals display an engaging, interactive personality, contradicting the observable characteristic emphasized by the DSM-5 and ICD-10 definitions of the<unk>  personality. Guntrip (using ideas of Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott) classifies these individuals as "secret<unk> s", who behave with socially available, interested, engaged and involved interaction yet remain emotionally withdrawn and sequestered within the safety of the internal world. Klein distinguishes between a "classic" SPD and a "secret" SPD, which occur "just as often" as each other. Klein cautions one should not misidentify the<unk>  person as a result of the patient's defensive, compensatory interaction with the external world. He suggests one ask the person what their subjective experience is, to detect the presence of the<unk>  refusal of emotional intimacy and preference for objective fact. Frequently, a<unk>  individual's social functioning improves, sometimes dramatically, when the individual knows they are an anonymous participant in a real-time conversation or correspondence, e.g. in an online chatroom or message board. It is often the case the individual's online correspondent will report nothing amiss in the individual's engagement and affect. A 2013 study looking at personality disorders and Internet use found that being online more hours per day predicted signs of SPD. Additionally, SPD correlated with lower phone call use and fewer Facebook friends. Descriptions of the<unk>  personality as "hidden" behind an outward appearance of emotional engagement have been recognized since 1940, with Fairbairn's description of<unk>  exhibitionism", in which the<unk>  individual is able to express a great deal of feeling and to make what appear to be impressive social contacts yet in reality gives nothing and loses nothing. Because they are "playing a part", their personality is not involved. According to Fairbairn, the person disowns the part they are playing, and the<unk>  individual seeks to preserve their personality intact and immune from compromise. The<unk> 's false persona is based around what those around them define as normal or good behaviour, as a form of compliance. Further references to the secret<unk>  come from Masud Khan, Jeffrey Seinfeld and Philip Manfield, who give a description of an SPD individual who "enjoys" public speaking engagements but experiences great difficulty in the breaks when audience members would attempt to engage him emotionally. These references expose the problems in relying on outer observable behavior for assessing the presence of personality disorders in certain individuals.<unk>  fantasy A pathological reliance on fantasizing and preoccupation with inner experience is often part of the<unk>  withdrawal from the world. Fantasy thus becomes a core component of the self in exile, though fantasizing in<unk>  individuals is far more complicated than a means of facilitating withdrawal. Fantasy is also a relationship with the world and with others by proxy. It is a substitute relationship, but a relationship nonetheless, characterized by idealized, defensive and compensatory mechanisms. This is self-contained and free from the dangers and anxieties associated with emotional connection to real persons and situations. Klein explains it as "an expression of the self struggling to connect to objects, albeit internal objects. Fantasy permits<unk>  patients to feel connected, and yet still free from the imprisonment in relationships. In short, in fantasy one can be attached (to internal objects) and still be free." This aspect of<unk>  pathology has been generously elaborated in works by R. D. Laing, Donald Winnicott and Ralph Klein. Sexuality People with SPD are sometimes sexually apathetic, though they do not typically suffer from anorgasmia. Their preference to remain alone and detached may cause their need for sex to appear to be less than that of those who do not have SPD. Sex often causes individuals with SPD to feel that their personal space is being violated, and they commonly feel that masturbation or sexual abstinence is preferable to the emotional closeness they must tolerate when having sex. Significantly broadening this picture are notable exceptions of SPD individuals who engage in occasional or even frequent sexual activities with others. Fairbairn notes that<unk> s can fear that in a relationship, their needs will weaken and exhaust their partner, so they feel forced to disown them and move to satisfy solely the needs of the partner. The net result of this is a loss of dignity and sense of self within any relationship they enter, eventually leading to intolerable frustration and friction. Appel notes that these fears result in the<unk> 's negativism, stubbornness and reluctance to love. Thus, a central conflict of the<unk>  is between an immense longing for relationships but a deep anxiety and avoidance of relationships, manifested by the choosing of the "lesser evil" of abandoning others. Individuals with SPD have long been noted to have an increased rate of unconventional sexual tendencies, though if present, these are rarely acted upon. The<unk>  is often labelled asexual or presents with "a lack of sexual identity". Kernberg states that this apparent lack of a sexuality does not represent a lack of sexual definition but rather a combination of several strong fixations to cope with the same conflicts. People with SPD are often able to pursue any fantasies with content on the Internet while remaining completely unengaged with the outside world. Akhtar's profile American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar provided a comprehensive phenomenological profile of SPD in which classic and contemporary descriptive views are synthesized with psychoanalytic observations. This profile is summarized in the table reproduced below that lists clinical features that involve six areas of psychosocial functioning and are organized by "overt" and "covert" manifestations. "Overt"
Schizoid personality disorder
Avoidant personality disorder
Histrionic personality disorder
Organic personality disorder
Haltlose personality disorder
Dependent personality disorder
Depressive personality disorder
Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder