De Identification

self alienation

De-identification — treated across the depth-psychological corpus under the cognate heading of ‘alienation from self’ — designates the condition in which the living subject loses felt continuity with his or her own psychic center. The literature exhibits a range of positions on both the phenomenology and the etiology of this rupture. Karen Horney provides the most clinically systematic account, distinguishing the dramatic pole (amnesia, depersonalization) from the pervasive, low-intensity alienation endemic to neurotic character structure, in which the ‘real self’ is not annihilated but progressively abandoned in favor of an idealized construction. Edward Edinger situates the phenomenon structurally: de-identification results from a damaged ego-Self axis, whether inflicted by parental rejection experienced as divine repudiation or by the ego’s inflationary presumption of total identity with the Self. These two Jungian and neo-Freudian framings share an underlying topology — a self that can be estranged from itself — yet diverge sharply on the question of whether the ground of identity is primarily interpersonal or archetypal. Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death’ surfaces as a trans-theoretical touchstone, invoked by Horney and implicitly echoed in Edinger’s account of despair as the signature affect of de-identification. The term thus traverses clinical, existential, and theological registers, making it one of the more generative — and contested — nodes in the depth-psychological lexicon.

In the library 16 passages

the abandoning of self corresponds to the selling of one’s soul. In psychiatric terms we call it the ‘alienation from self.’ This latter term is applied chiefly to those extreme conditions in which people lose their feeling of identity

Horney establishes alienation from self as the psychiatric name for a spectrum reaching from dramatic depersonalization down to the subtle, pervasive erosion of identity characteristic of neurosis.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The loss of self, says Kierkegaard, is ‘sickness unto death’; it is despair — despair at not being conscious of having a self, or despair at not being willing to be ourselves.

Invoking Kierkegaard, Horney argues that alienation from self is a silent, unclamoring despair that patients do not consciously register, making it clinically invisible and therapeutically insidious.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the ego-Self axis is damaged and the child is then predisposed in later life to states of alienation which can reach unbearable proportions. This course of events is due to the fact that the child experiences parental rejection as rejection by God.

Edinger roots de-identification in the structural damage to the ego-Self axis caused by parental rejection, which is experienced archetypally as divine repudiation and becomes the psychic template for later alienation.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.

Horney documents how de-identification allows the neurotic to maintain surface functionality while the real self is absent, tracing the consequences across emotional life, energy, self-direction, and integrating capacity.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

alienation begins; the ego-Self axis is damaged. A kind of unhealing psychic wound is created in the process of learning he is not the deity he thought he was.

Edinger frames de-identification as the structural consequence of each developmental reality-encounter that separates the ego from its original unconscious identity with the Self, producing an unhealing wound if reunion is not restored.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

their alienation from self makes it possible for them to change their personality according to the requirements of the situation. Chameleonlike, they always play some role in life without knowing that they do it

Horney identifies the capacity for chameleonic role-playing as a symptomatic marker of de-identification, where the absence of a stable self-center enables unlimited, unconscious persona-shifting.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Disconnection between the ego and Self causes a ‘lack of self-acceptance … emptiness, despair, [and] meaninglessness’ as if an individual feels they are not ‘worthy to exist’

Drawing on Edinger, Dennett links ego-Self disconnection — the operative mechanism of de-identification — to the specific phenomenology of unworthiness, emptiness, and addictive symptom formation.

Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

alienation results from the fact that the real parent simply cannot accept all the aspects of the child’s personality that are contained in the self.

Samuels synthesizes Edinger and Neumann to show that ego-Self alienation — the Jungian form of de-identification — originates in the parental failure to carry and affirm the full range of the child’s selfhood.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

is it not the same for all practical purposes whether on the one hand the self is weakened, or paralyzed, or ‘driven from sight’ by the neurotic process or on the other hand inherently is not a constructive force?

Horney interrogates the practical convergence between her account of de-identification (the real self driven from sight) and Freud’s structurally weak ego, while insisting on a theoretical difference of profound consequence.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

he depicts the ‘self’ of a neurotic person who is alienated from his spontaneous energies, from his authentic wishes, who does not make any decisions of his own and assume responsibility for them

Horney argues that Freud’s concept of the neurotic ego is itself a portrait of the de-identified self — alienated from spontaneous energy and authentic volition — without Freud having named it as such.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

danger arises ‘whenever an act is performed for the immediate gratification of the ego … without reference to the archetypal roots of that act.’ This is an exact description of inflation

Edinger identifies inflation — ego action severed from archetypal grounding — as a precipitant of alienation, making inflationary de-rooting the structural complement to the de-identification wrought by ego-Self axis damage.

Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

He discards lightly all the evidence presented. He considers it an attempt by the others involved to try to rationalize away their own guilt or responsibility.

Horney shows how the de-identified neurotic evades responsibility for the consequences of his actions, a dynamic she situates as a key behavioral expression of alienation from self.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

utter metaphysical elevation coincides, in the acosmic essence of man, with utter cosmic alienation.

King’s account of Gnostic anthropology offers a mythological cognate for de-identification: the transmundane self is simultaneously most itself and most alienated from the cosmic order in which it is imprisoned.

Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms