Essay

Introduction

Alienation is the act of withdrawing a person's affections from something else. One can alienate another person, a group of persons, an idea or social reality, or even aspects of their own body or behaviors. Alienation often results in an indifference or outright aversion by an individual like Bruno or group of individuals toward some aspect of life that might otherwise be attractive and significant. Ignoring others or treating them in a way that causes the other person or group discomfort or excludes them from participating in social aspects of life is an example of alienation (Bellah, 1985).

Some ethnic minorities in the United States, women, and people with disabilities have a history of being excluded from full participation in social life by others in power, and are examples of how groups in power can alienate those not in power. People can be alienated, or indifferent, to the products they make or promote in their work (Blauner, 1964). Another example of alienation is when an individual like Bruno withdraws emotional connection from aspects of themselves, such as a part of their body that has an impairment or illness. Often they consider that the impaired body part no longer is a part of them and is indifferently or negatively perceived by the individual like Bruno.

Discussion

Alienation is a process that develops in an ongoing relationship between an individual like Bruno and another person or group of people, or in an individual like Bruno as he or she negotiates the emotional terrain of dealing with an unwanted aspect of the person's physical or psychological state. It involves an unexpected deterioration in the quality of interactions and outcomes between individual like Bruno players, and it continues until the alienated individual like Bruno or aspect of the individual like Bruno remains spatially or psychologically separate from others or to the whole person. Alienation is the experience of being disconnected with one's self, with others, with one's gods, nature, or a transcendent realm of being (Fromm, 1941).

While alienation is not considered to be a mental disorder, it is recognized as an element of a condition called antisocial personality disorder. Often alienation overlaps with other major psychological symptoms such as boredom, depression, and loss of locus of control.

Alienation is related to social problems both in substance and in terms of how we look at social problems. In the context of modern everyday language and “commonsense” perspectives and views, the term alienation frequently is employed to express a feeling of separation—ranging from one's experiences with others, work, nature, social environment, political process, and system, all the way to “the world as it is” (Durkheim, 1964).

Yet this feeling of being separated links concretely to the prevalence of myriad social problems (unemployment, drug abuse, poverty, mental illness, domestic violence, etc.). Understood in this latter sense, alienation can serve as a means to express and describe a certain type of experience and, more important, as a tool to address and dissect the nature of everyday life and to identify its ...