Self abandonment occupies a complex and contested position within the depth-psychological corpus, appearing across clinical, developmental, existential, and recovery-oriented literatures with meaningfully distinct inflections. At its most fundamental, the term designates the psychic process by which an individual relinquishes authentic selfhood — its needs, boundaries, desires, and integrity — typically in response to environmental threat, relational trauma, or developmental arrest. Karen Horney maps the 'abandoning of the real self' as a cornerstone of neurotic structure, wherein the idealized self supplants genuine identity. Erich Fromm situates self-abandonment within a socio-psychological economy of escape, describing how the isolated individual dissolves the burden of selfhood through masochistic submission. The Adult Children of Alcoholics literature treats self-abandonment as a defining legacy of dysfunctional family systems — a survival-conditioned reflex that persists destructively into adult life and requires active spiritual recovery. Ingrid Clayton, writing on fawning, nuances the concept by distinguishing adaptive self-abandonment (survival intelligence in an abusive context) from its chronic, post-traumatic repetition. Wolfgang Giegerich introduces a philosophically ambitious reading, wherein self-abandonment as absolute negativity may carry transformative, even sacred, significance. The term thus functions as both symptom and, in certain traditions, paradoxical threshold toward authentic selfhood.
In the library
12 passages
Killing as absolute self-investment, even self-abandonment to the Other is an idea totally alien to our positivistic thinking. But it is of highest importance to regain such a negative notion of killing.
Giegerich argues that self-abandonment understood as absolute negativity — total surrender to the Other — is a lost but philosophically vital category that, when reclaimed, reveals how the soul's destructive needs need not manifest as literal violence.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Without help, we can abandon ourselves in a heartbeat. He believed we can only be healed by self-love and the hand of God called upon by the willing adult child.
The ACA text positions self-abandonment as the near-automatic consequence of unresolved shame and abandonment trauma inherited from dysfunctional families, treatable only through self-love and spiritual intervention.
INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012thesis
Real self, 17; abandoning of, 23, 24, 34, 157, 171; alienation from, 11, 21, 257, 271; and central inner conflicts, 112
Horney's index entry establishes 'abandoning of the real self' as a structural concept distributed throughout her theory of neurosis, linking it systematically to alienation, pride systems, self-hate, and the idealized self.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
I can't even call this self-abandonment. I call it grace, genius, or higher wisdom bestowed upon me. It was lifesaving, and these impulses helped me navigate four more years in that house.
Clayton contests the uniform pathologizing of self-abandonment, arguing that in acute trauma contexts the self-effacing fawn response constitutes adaptive survival intelligence rather than a psychological deficit.
Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025thesis
The ACA Big Book's index reveals self-abandonment as a formally recognized, extensively discussed category, situated among self-hate, shame, self-harm, and the divided self within the ACA conceptual framework.
INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.
Fromm frames self-abandonment as the psychological mechanism underlying masochistic submission, wherein the intolerable weight of individual freedom drives the isolated person to dissolve selfhood into a stronger authority.
Without self-love, the Twelfth Step merely becomes another goal we achieve or a mark we pass on our way to pleasing others or abandoning ourselves.
The ACA Steps Workbook identifies self-abandonment as the covert dynamic within compulsive service behavior, arguing that genuine recovery requires self-love as a prior condition lest altruistic action become another form of self-erasure.
Organization, Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service, The twelve steps of adult children steps workbook, 2007supporting
a chronic fawn response can make us more vulnerable to narcissistic abuse. After I left home, my fawn response created a feeling where I knew safety only in the context of exploitative, abusive relationships.
Clayton demonstrates how chronic self-abandonment through fawning, once learned as a survival strategy under narcissistic parenting, becomes an ingrained relational template that perpetuates exploitation into adult life.
Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025supporting
Shame and abandonment are two of the most identifiable traits of a dysfunctional home. Among other factors, they are two of the conditions that help produce an adult child whether alcohol or drugs are in the home or not.
The ACA text positions abandonment — including self-abandonment — as co-constitutive with shame in forming the adult-child psychology, establishing both as environmental preconditions rather than intrinsic character flaws.
INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
Somewhere in there was a realization that she was going to have to rebuild every part of herself and her life. It had never been so clear. None of it was working.
Clayton presents the collapse of the fawn-structured relationship as the moment of recognition that years of self-abandonment have left no intact self remaining, making complete reconstruction necessary — and possible.
Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025supporting
she then asked herself the pertinent question: what made this urge so strong just now? She then experienced considerable self-hate and self-contempt of which she had not been aware.
Horney illustrates how the masochistic urge to submit and degrade oneself — a behavioral expression of self-abandonment — is driven by unconscious self-hate that analytic self-inquiry can interrupt.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950aside
Abandonment is the bookend to shame when growing up in a dysfunctional family. Abandonment can be a physical abandonment in which our parents left us with friends, relatives, or day care centers while they practiced their addictions.
The ACA text elaborates the external abandonment that becomes internalized as self-abandonment, describing how early parental neglect and emotional withdrawal model a pattern the child then enacts upon itself.
INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside