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.
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Notes
Helen Deutsch, Neurosis and Character Types (New York: International University Press, 1965), p. 265.
Ibid., p. 263.
Ibid., p. 264.
Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid., p. 257.
D. C. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International University Press, 1980), p. 146.
Ibid., p. 149.
Ibid., p. 148.
J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 79.
P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (An Essay on Interpretation) (Yale University Press, 1978), p. 176.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 372.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 69.
Ibid., p. 67.
J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 257.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), p. 220.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), p. 398.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Northern University Press, 1968), p. 80.
I am using “supporting” now in a Lacanian sense. The infinite should be a telos which guides the moral ethical life of man as a normative Telos towards which he transcends himself, and yet, as opposed to Kant, the infinite cannot be external to the process, for it is constitutive of the very transcendental characteristic of existence.
M.. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), p. 157.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Yale University Press, 1978), p. 16.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Bolivar, E. (1998). On Human Alienation. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Creative Virtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-in-Culture. Analecta Husserliana, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4890-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4890-0_17
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