We may say that isolation is a core of type V character in that the characteristic detachment not only from people but more generally from the world (including one's own body) depends on the inactivation of feelings and also corresponds to an avoidance of the situation in which feelings normally arise: an interruption of the life process in the service of feeling-avoidance.

The incongruence of aloofness with the ordinary human need for contact is maintained through a dulling of the emotional life; at other times in the more hypersensitive variety of individual, it exists side by side with intense feelings, which appear in greater association with the aesthetic and the abstract than with the interpersonal world. Also the avoidance of action in type V may be seen in light of an avoidance of feeling and of the isolation mechanism, and would deserve the name of motoric isolation better than the interruption of thoughts and the disturbance of gestalt perception through mental blocking.

Where there is remoteness not only from others but also from the world, action is unnecessary, and conversely, the avoidance of action supports the avoidance of relationship.

As in other characters here too we may ask ourselves whether the mechanism of isolation has arisen in connection with a particularly avoided realm of experience, so that its typical operation matches a typical repressed content. The answer seems to be given by the enneagram structure itself, for once more we may understand that the attitude of type V is most opposite to that of type VIII, and it would seem that its ,over- control, diminished vitality, and disposition not to invest itself in any particular course of action or relationship entails a corresponding taboo on intensity and fear of potential destructiveness. Type V is the very negation of lusty super- abundance, and thus we are invited to think about the mechanism of splitting as arisen from an individual's way of protecting himself against a primitive and impulsive response to the environment. His skill in separating himself conceptually and analytically considering the aspects of a situation allows him to see such situations as something unrelated to personal needs- and thus leads to the restriction of personal needs that goes hand-in-hand with avarice in self-spending.
– Claudio Naranjo, Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View