Psychology and Treatment of Depersonalization

Preamble*: Psychoanalysis is very familiar with the conceptions of identification and projection. It is less outspoken about the obvious difference between the mechanism of identification, and its result: a figure, a phantom existing in us because of identification. If we identify—and this is always an unconscious act in contradistinction to conscious emulation—with a great man whom we admire, we might identify with his handwriting, the way he walks, clears his throat, smiles and shakes hands. The result is a phantom of the great man living in us. Part of our personality is then expressed in terms of this phantom; people who watch us recognize the phantom and our behavior may make us appear even slightly ridiculous. Our ambition to be as great as our model has chosen the wrong way. The correct way: to acquire the great man's real values, those for which he is admired, and to continue his work, is evidently much more difficult, meaning years of hard work with the possibility of failure because of inefficiency. To erect a phantom of the great man by identification is easier. It is accomplished without much pain or strain using the well lubricated machinery of identification. You wish to equal him? Very difficult, almost impossible, says reality. Very easy, says the dream; I can do it “in no time”.

It so happens that this narcissistic wishfulfillment crowds our psychic space with a number of phantoms, all of them results of identifications. They contribute to the structure of our personality, can be integrated and disintegrated. Unconscious tendencies of all kinds exist in us in the form of phantoms. Many of them are well known to psychoanalysis and were given the names of figures of myth and literature. Usually they wear the quite superfluous supplement complex (Oedipus complex, Jehovah complex, etc.).

This supplement—although universally accepted and very popular