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There?s no way of knowing for sure, of course, but I think that DP must be primarily a modern phenomenon. To quote psychologist Rollo May: ??the ?typical? kind of psychic problem in our day is not hysteria, as it was in Freud?s time, but?the problem of persons who are detached, unrelated, lacking in affect, tending towards depersonalization, and covering up their problems by means of intellectualizations and technical formulations?.There is also plenty of evidence that the sense of isolation, the alienation of one?s self from the world is suffered not only by people in pathological conditions, but by countless ?normal? persons as well in our day.?
We live today in environments that are almost wholly artificial?modern cities. But for most of his existence, man has lived in nature, and prior to modern times, even the city dweller maintained some contact with nature. Living in nature, man is surrounded by something larger than himself, that which is non-human?what is for him the Other. He is continually conditioned and taught by it; it grounds him in reality and keeps his ego in check. Living in modern cities, virtually everything that we come into contact with is a product of human invention or artifice. This means that environmentally, we live inside the human mind. We have little contact with the Other; we live a sealed-off existence. On an individual level, this leads people to dissociate from their bodies and leaves them living inside their minds. The degree to which this happens is different for different people, but it happens to some degree in everyone. Depersonalization disorder is but an extreme expression of this.
A big part of the reason for this is that compared to a natural environment, a city is a highly impoverished source of sensory stimulation. A child or an animal growing up in a city receives far, far less amount and variety of sensory stimulation than one growing up in nature, and since the brain and body require this stimulation for their full development, the modern person does not develop to the extent found in previous generations. Our bodies are designed to find their grounding in nature, and to live cut off from nature is, to some extent, like living a sensory deprivation experience. And sensory deprivation causes insanity; it causes depersonalization.
Another big part of this scenario is television. I think the most dangerous thing about television, at least the way it is used today, is not the content of the programs, but rather certain qualities of the medium itself, combined with the fact that it makes up such a large part of our experience (the average American child watches four hours per day). The thing about my experience of TV that bothers me the most is the fact that I believe that what I?m seeing is true. It usually takes an effort on my part to be conscious that what I?m seeing is people acting?to not just know it intellectually, but to actually perceive it. One big reason we believe that what we?re seeing is real is because we cannot see outside the frame. If we?re in a theater watching a play, we see not only the action but also the physical reality beyond the frame?the theater itself. We cannot help but be aware that what we?re seeing is acting. The only time we get that with television is when we watch a ?behind the scenes? segment, which shows a movie or show actually being shot. Sometimes the segment will show the normal perspective of the movie or show, and then the camera will pan back to show the reality beyond what is normally the frame?the director, the cameras, the people working on the shot. Or sometimes at the end of a movie you?ll see outtakes, in which the actors stop acting their roles and revert to their normal personae. In these moments of switching from the one perspective to the other, we suddenly become aware that we were/are watching acting. For me, this is always a shock, and I sit wondering at the fact that I was so thoroughly fooled.
I believe that when we spend so much time, especially in the formative years of our lives, experiencing something that is make-believe and believing on a perceptual level that it is real, that those actors are really the roles they are acting and that they are really doing those things, that this must have a profound effect on our perception of reality. In a TV show or movie, everything is scripted; everyone knows exactly what to do and say. Also, most everything one sees is really a fa?ade, from the sets to the characters, so it?s kind of a two-dimensional reality. And we skip around from place to place and from time period to time period in a way that is very different from real life. But when we?re continually experiencing a scripted show as reality, this must create enormous psychic conflict in us as we are living our lives in the world. I think that all this is a big part of the reason for a shift that has occurred in modern times in the way that people perceive their lives: part of us is always standing outside ourselves, watching our lives in the same way that we watch television. In a very fundamental way, we?re not involved in our lives anymore; we watch them like we are acting in a TV show or a movie. And I don?t have to tell the people on this forum how very like DP this is, how in DP that kind of detached watching becomes the basic way of experiencing reality. So I think that the way we use television is itself enormously ungrounding and depersonalizing. And it?s all the more damaging because, suffering from the sensory deprivation that comes with living in artificial environments, we attempt to use television to fill in the gaps. We try to use it to provide the reality that?s missing--often it?s the most stimulating thing around--only it?s NOT reality.
(That quote from Rollo May is from 1958, by the way. How much farther along are we today in creating the kind of environments and lifestyles that foster alienation and depersonalization.)
We live today in environments that are almost wholly artificial?modern cities. But for most of his existence, man has lived in nature, and prior to modern times, even the city dweller maintained some contact with nature. Living in nature, man is surrounded by something larger than himself, that which is non-human?what is for him the Other. He is continually conditioned and taught by it; it grounds him in reality and keeps his ego in check. Living in modern cities, virtually everything that we come into contact with is a product of human invention or artifice. This means that environmentally, we live inside the human mind. We have little contact with the Other; we live a sealed-off existence. On an individual level, this leads people to dissociate from their bodies and leaves them living inside their minds. The degree to which this happens is different for different people, but it happens to some degree in everyone. Depersonalization disorder is but an extreme expression of this.
A big part of the reason for this is that compared to a natural environment, a city is a highly impoverished source of sensory stimulation. A child or an animal growing up in a city receives far, far less amount and variety of sensory stimulation than one growing up in nature, and since the brain and body require this stimulation for their full development, the modern person does not develop to the extent found in previous generations. Our bodies are designed to find their grounding in nature, and to live cut off from nature is, to some extent, like living a sensory deprivation experience. And sensory deprivation causes insanity; it causes depersonalization.
Another big part of this scenario is television. I think the most dangerous thing about television, at least the way it is used today, is not the content of the programs, but rather certain qualities of the medium itself, combined with the fact that it makes up such a large part of our experience (the average American child watches four hours per day). The thing about my experience of TV that bothers me the most is the fact that I believe that what I?m seeing is true. It usually takes an effort on my part to be conscious that what I?m seeing is people acting?to not just know it intellectually, but to actually perceive it. One big reason we believe that what we?re seeing is real is because we cannot see outside the frame. If we?re in a theater watching a play, we see not only the action but also the physical reality beyond the frame?the theater itself. We cannot help but be aware that what we?re seeing is acting. The only time we get that with television is when we watch a ?behind the scenes? segment, which shows a movie or show actually being shot. Sometimes the segment will show the normal perspective of the movie or show, and then the camera will pan back to show the reality beyond what is normally the frame?the director, the cameras, the people working on the shot. Or sometimes at the end of a movie you?ll see outtakes, in which the actors stop acting their roles and revert to their normal personae. In these moments of switching from the one perspective to the other, we suddenly become aware that we were/are watching acting. For me, this is always a shock, and I sit wondering at the fact that I was so thoroughly fooled.
I believe that when we spend so much time, especially in the formative years of our lives, experiencing something that is make-believe and believing on a perceptual level that it is real, that those actors are really the roles they are acting and that they are really doing those things, that this must have a profound effect on our perception of reality. In a TV show or movie, everything is scripted; everyone knows exactly what to do and say. Also, most everything one sees is really a fa?ade, from the sets to the characters, so it?s kind of a two-dimensional reality. And we skip around from place to place and from time period to time period in a way that is very different from real life. But when we?re continually experiencing a scripted show as reality, this must create enormous psychic conflict in us as we are living our lives in the world. I think that all this is a big part of the reason for a shift that has occurred in modern times in the way that people perceive their lives: part of us is always standing outside ourselves, watching our lives in the same way that we watch television. In a very fundamental way, we?re not involved in our lives anymore; we watch them like we are acting in a TV show or a movie. And I don?t have to tell the people on this forum how very like DP this is, how in DP that kind of detached watching becomes the basic way of experiencing reality. So I think that the way we use television is itself enormously ungrounding and depersonalizing. And it?s all the more damaging because, suffering from the sensory deprivation that comes with living in artificial environments, we attempt to use television to fill in the gaps. We try to use it to provide the reality that?s missing--often it?s the most stimulating thing around--only it?s NOT reality.
(That quote from Rollo May is from 1958, by the way. How much farther along are we today in creating the kind of environments and lifestyles that foster alienation and depersonalization.)
