alienation

Alienation, which comes from idiom Latin (alienation), is he act and result of alienating. This verb, for its part, alludes to alienate, remove or split.

The concept appears in various Sciences. At a general level, it can be said that alienation consists of the loss of something that is your own or that constitutes the essence. As a result, the alienated subject acts differently from what is expected or anticipated.

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), alienation can occur when a person or group modify your conscience until it becomes contradictory with what is awaited by its condition. A worker who votes for a political party that promotes the free market, the adjustment and the cutting of state services can be considered a victim of alienation: by the action of the media or by another mechanism, it is a individual who votes against the interests of his class.

For him Marxism, in capitalist society the workers suffer an alienation since they are not considered as human beings, but as workforce which is represented by what it costs in money. People thus become usable according to their role in capitalism.

According to psychology, alienation is a state of mind characterized by absence of the perception of one's own identity or by a distancing from reality. Someone under the influence of a narcotic may be alienated.

Alienation, in this context, supposes the loss of that feeling that some call self-referentiality or self-awareness, since identity can be understood as the ability that living beings have to consider ourselves separate individuals from the reality that surrounds us, independent entities from which we appreciate through the senses. When this feeling is affected, we stop acting normal.

It is worth mentioning that the psychoanalysis he does not always associate alienation with a pathology of the mind; so much so that it contemplates the occurrence of this phenomenon in apparently healthy people or without a history of mental disorders.

According to psychoanalysis, almost all people can go through moments of mental alienation if we are subjected to extreme conditions. We must not confuse this state with the one experienced in psychosis: while in this state the patient lives a delirium Instead of the reality that he would normally perceive, during alienation he replaces it with someone else's speech.

Mental alienation is a disease that can be acquired or congenital, occur circumstantially or habitually. In addition to the characteristics exposed in the previous paragraphs, we can say that it usually presents the following four symptoms, which may appear to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the case:

* inability to understand reality, both concretely and abstractly. When you stop perceiving yourself as a being with your own identity, the rest of the elements of the world are also blurred and it becomes impossible to treat them adequately;

* inability to judge one's own or others' actions from a moral point of view, that is, to distinguish between right and wrong, legal and illegal;

* great difficulty for adapt to the normal rules of coexistence, both within the family group and at work or on public roads;

* inability to assume responsibilities and maintain them over time. This is appreciated in various legal and administrative areas, since the subject cannot get and keep a job or respect the laws. terms from an educational center but also do not enjoy certain rights and government aid.