A case of chronic depersonalization was presented and discussed from the point of view of the ego defects in perception and cognition considered to be either chronically present or regressively reactivated in order for this symptom to occur.

Although it is clearly not a neurotic symptom, or a single phenomenological entity, depersonalization appears to be a compromise formation fulfilling all of the classical requirements of the definition of a symptom (8). It expresses the id drive for oral (aggressive and libidinal) union with the mother's breast, and the ego's efforts to maintain itself against the consequent threat to its sense of self by the nonneurotic defense mechanisms of denial and denial in fantasy with a regressive hypercathexis of the sensory modalities.