[Schizoid versus hysterical personality structure. II: Social behavior of precipitating events]

38 schizoid and 70 hysterical patients with neurotic disturbances are compared with regard to social data, intelligence and triggering situation. Schizoids are more frequently single, childless and live alone, while hysterics are married, remarried or divorced, have one child and live with their partner and the child. With nearly the same education and intelligence, schizoid patients are more often workers/skilled workers, pupils/apprentices/students or have no profession; hysterically structured individuals, being predominantly women, are more frequently housewives. Nearly half of the most frequent triggering events are equally distributed in both structure groups; these are particularly events signalling a change during development, which, in degree of severity, can just as well be minor threshold situations as serious reverses. With an earlier age of onset, schizoids decompensate significantly more often in "developmental stages", whereas hysterical patients are more likely to do so in connection with events of "love-sexuality" and those which provoke hysterical anxieties. Of the 15 most frequent events, only 6 each occur in either the schizoids (starting school, puberty, moving away from home, entering into a heterosexual relationship in terms of a casual encounter, beginning an apprenticeship or studies, failure in a test) or the hysterically structured individuals (vacation, marriage, pregnancy/delivery, marital disharmony, extra-marital relationship and severe illness of the patient).