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Among the dramatic and continuous symptoms of a fifteen-year-old schizophrenic girl were complaints of depersonalization—intense feelings of unreality, estrangement, and changes in her body and mind, which began after her mother's death. Also persistent were uncanny experiences of feeling her mother's presence and hearing her voice.
The author postulates that in the depersonalization state, there is regression to the early symbiotic state of the mother-child relationship. The symptoms reproduce the developmental events of body-image formation. While there are areas of ego intactness, primary processes predominate and instinctual drive defusion occurs. Body and self are invested with hate. The hypothesis is made that during the early mother-child symbiotic relationship, the periodic absence of the mother is experienced as a loss of narcissistic cathexis by the infant. This is 'primal depersonalization' and is reproduced in the regression of the depersonalized state. Depersonalization as a special type of reaction to the loss of a love object differs from the mourning melancholia, or the obsessive-compulsive syndromes in that the loss is not acknowledged at all and the object lives in symbiotic union with the subject.