Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

February 11, 1958. DEPERSONALIZATION. Edith Jacobson, M.D.

The phenomenon of depersonalization is delimited to disturbances in a person's experience either of his body (or parts of it), or of his mental self. Where parts of the body are involved, the person may describe them as being estranged, not feeling as his own, or as being dead. Where depersonalization extends to the mental self, there is a feeling of being outside one's self. He may feel that he is a detached spectator who is observing another person walk, talk, and act. Often the experience is frightening. Jacobson specifically excludes such phenomena as derealization and loss of identity. They may accompany depersonalization but are not identical with it. In derealization the feeling of unreality is related to the object world rather than to the self. In loss of identity the question is 'Who am I?'. This need not be accompanied by any feeling of depersonalization. Jacobson analyzes depersonalization in a group of female political prisoners of essentially normal psychic make-up, and in four analytic cases. No cases of psychosis are presented but she states her belief that the nature of the processes leading to depersonalization is essentially the same in all. From these studies, Jacobson concludes that depersonalization tends to develop in situations where the ego is threatened by sudden regressive processes. These involve drive defusion and pregenital-drive invasion, the ego being torn between two opposing identifications. One part of the ego strives to maintain normal behavior, resting on previous stable identifications; the other part, temporarily regressed, accepts infantile, sado-masochistic, pregenital identifications. A split in the ego results. The process is facilitated by a weak, unstable, or contradictory superego since this predisposes to a failure in repression and to drive intrusions into the ego. The basic conflict is within the ego and has its origin in the struggle between