The term "depersonalization" refers to the appearance of subjective impressions of change affecting the person or the surrounding world. Their intensity varies, ranging from a simple feeling of dizziness to painful feelings of physical transformation, from the fleeting feeling of estrangement to the impression that the world has become unrecognizable, dead, or uninhabited. Moments of depersonalization can occur during the customary development of any individual or within overtly pathological clinical settings.

The concept of depersonalization is not directly present in the work of Sigmund Freud. In "Psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides)" (1911c [1910]), the elements of depersonalization perceptible in the subject's memory—themes of physical transformation, nerves of voluptuousness, the "hastily improvised men"—are not treated as such by Freud. Similarly the themes of...