Depersonalization1

Many years ago I had the opportunity of observing a group of political female prisoners in Nazi Germany, whose reactions I described in a previous paper (11). To my surprise I found that during the first weeks or months of arrest, many of these rather normal individuals developed states of depersonalization, evidently in response to their traumatic experiences.

Up to then I had not encountered this phenomenon in any of my analytic patients. Thus, all I noticed and mentioned in my paper was the transparent connection of such states with the universal reaction of prisoners to the narcissistic blow inflicted by their arrest: the feeling that "this could not possibly have happened to them." Since then the psychoanalytic study of depersonalization in some of my patients has permitted me to form more concise ideas about this condition, which I should like to present.

Let us first briefly delimit the kind of experience to which this discussion will refer. Even though depersonalization certainly involves a disturbance of object relations, it is an experience pertaining either to the bodily or to the mental self. In the first case, the person will complain that his body or rather certain parts of the body do not feel like his own, as belonging to him. He may describe them as being estranged from himself or as being dead. This experience may go along with subjective sensations of numb-ness and of change of size and volume of the estranged body parts. The person may try to touch and feel them in order to convince himself that they are really "his." Not rarely may we detect states of depersonalization pertaining to the genitals and to the sexual