Depersonalization, as an experience involving a feeling of alienation from the self or the body and its parts, has been considered to be a narcissistic disturbance involving a split in the ego aimed at defending against the eruption of a massive complex of feelings of deprivation, anxiety, and rage. The nature of the processes leading to depersonalization is essentially the same in normal, neurotic, and psychotic persons. Observations of a group of female political prisoners in Nazi Germany demonstrate the precipitating importance of a sudden loss of the old self-image, as defined by the interplay of identifications between self and familiar environment, under the impact of incarceration in a new and repulsive reality which identified them as criminals. Depersonalization occurred at times when the ego of the prisoner vacillated between the contradictory regressive, sadomasochistic 'delinquency' state consonant with her criminal status, and a state of controlled civility characteristic of her previous, normal adjustment. By