The author presents several case histories of patients with feelings of unreality, strangeness, depersonalization, or 'not belonging'. He attributes these symptoms to childhood experiences with parents who were themselves cold and removed and unable to give sufficient love to produce a sense of security in their children. By a process of transference the child assumes that all other adults are equally removed and cold. The emotional removal serves to protect the patient from further trauma which would ensue should he become involved and then rejected as he was in childhood. The illusion of superiority sometimes accompanies such isolation, and serves as a defense against the underlying feelings of inferiority of deficiency, which resulted from the original parental rejection. The psychoanalytic theories of depersonalization are not discussed.