Diagnosing The English Patient: Schizoid fantasies of being skinless and of being buried alive

The psychological world of The English Patient is explored to deepen the un derstanding of schizoid states. The protagonist, Almas, is a remote desert explorer whose triangular sadomasochistic affair with the married Katharine destroys them all. His damaged skin is understood as a symbolic representa tion of his psychological condition. For the schizoid, love consumes and le ads to obliteration of the self, represented by the loss of identifying fea tures, and to traumatic permeability (i.e., the loss of boundaries between self and other, and between the ego and repressed desires). Other schizoid themes are the animation of the inanimate, as in the depiction of the deser t as a woman; hidden or buried identities; the digital and destructive expe rience of emotion represented by the conundrum of the bomb defuser; the sen se that everything good is imaginary and might suddenly explode; and the mo ral unevenness of the characters. Almasy collaborates with the Nazis so he can retrieve Katharine's three-year-old corpse, with which he has necrophil ic contact in a cave. Fantasies of the lost object buried within the self, of being buried alive, and of being skinned alive are related to the schizo id condition. Hyperpermeability is proposed as a core schizoid state, under lying schizoid withdrawal.