On Human Alienation

Abstract

Much has been said about human alienation in our time. I believe that the best way to approach this difficult subject, pregnant with philosophical and psychological implications, is to try to approach it in its most concrete manifestations. In this sense, the best approach might be to try to analyze this phenomenon in terms of the most representative expression of universal modern alienation. I think that this concrete expression of the more general phenomenon of human alienation in our times is to be discovered in a particular type of personality. I am referring to that type of personality which Robert Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist, defined in terms of the “divided self”, or, in more traditional psychiatric terminology, as the schizoid personality. It is our intention to describe this type of character pathology in psychoanalytical and phenomenological terms, in order to arrive at an understanding of modern man’s spiritual crisis.