Depersonalization: Standing in the Spaces Between Recognition and Interpellation

Depersonalization is the experience of profound estrangement and alienation from Self and Reality. Although highly prevalent in our postmodern world, the syndrome of depersonalization has been systematically understudied, misdiagnosed, and unsuccessfully treated. In this paper we summarize our theoretical conclusions after a decade-long empirical study of this population and discuss both etiology and recommendations for treatment. Our main objective here is to place what psychiatrically we would consider pathologies of personhood within the larger context of culture. We include a clinical vignette to demonstrate how we work with the premise that depersonalization is not only a private event. Perhaps more than other problems-in-living, it reveals the centrality of the individual's relationship to discourse, the State, and the culture in which we breathe. We discuss depersonalization and the dissociative structuring of the mind as psychological responses to particularly problematic experiences around subjection and conclude with the function of shame and humiliation in maintaining and resisting (in the political sense) this pressure to fragment.