Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be

Amiel's Journal is one of literature's great curiosities. Published posthu-mously in 1882, it is the private diary of an obscure Swiss university professor who lived from 1821 to 1881. Day by day, over a period of more than 30 years, Amiel documented his most intimate thoughts and observations on many subjects, including European culture, politics, religion, women, and, in particular, his own identity. In all, Amiel "wrote more than 17.000 journal entries.

Before his death, Amiel requested that his friends, who included several writers and literary critics, find some use for his voluminous journal. The result was a condensed two-volume work that has earned a unique place in the annals of psychology and philosophy.

Amiel's Journal does not reveal a solitary thinker's slow descent into madness as some had expected. It is instead the meticulous record of a man whose life never really got off the ground because he was never really grounded in this life. He was, using his terminology, from the age of 16, depersonalized.

Amiel was born to French parents in Geneva, Switzerland, where he lived and worked his entire life. When he was 12 years old, both of his parents died "while in their 30s. Living "with relatives, he was understandably forlorn and melancholy and showed a deep interest in religious ideas, particularly Calvinism, which was prevalent in Geneva. As he matured, he traveled widely and was exposed to the nineteenth century's thinkers, including Rousseau and Hegel. He completed his formal education in Heidelberg and Berlin, then returned home.

Amid the continent's social upheavals, Geneva provided a peaceful haven for someone like Amiel, who showed potential for contributing to the rapidly evolving political, philosophical, and scientific thinking of the day. He began a promising career by winning a public competition to become professor of French literature at the prestigious Academy of Geneva. Just 4 years later, at age 28, he was elevated to professor of moral philosophy. This was, at the time, the fast track to academic success. It was the perfect venue in which would-be philosophers and writers could take the time to fine-tune their thoughts and become lost in their own personal magnum opus.
For Amiel, however, the prestigious job in academia was not a fortuitous beginning but a dead end. In time, as the years passed, his friends and ac-quaintances began to woncier why. He was uncommonly intelligent, articu-late, even sociable, yet year after year, nothing emerged from this wellspring of possibilities but dry college lectures and, periodically, literary criticism that reaffirmed his talent, followed by poetry that did not.

His closest confidant, critic M. Edmund Scherer, recalled years later: "He awakened in us but one regret; we could not understand how it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities."2

The answer all along, unknown to his friends, was recorded in his private journal, which spawned keen interest, particularly from an unexpected quarter—the leading psychologists of the day. The journal was something yet unseen, a lifelong case history of a certain type of personality, which could be excerpted out of context to prove a point for any number of emerging psychological theories. To Dugas he was detached, depersonalized, to Pierre Janet he likely manifested "psychasthenia" and its characteristic sentiment d'incompletude (experience of incompleteness), and still others saw his life as incorporating an unlikely combination of Christian and Buddhist belief systems. But above all, his writing reflects a personal life that is symptomatic of the indecision and dysfunction so often caused by depersonalization disorder.

Amiel's depersonalization did not often manifest itself in numbness or lack of feeling. He felt things deeply. But a predominant theme permeates his journal: The world and everything in it, including his personal identity, felt unreal, unfounded, and "without substance. True reality, he concluded, beyond the veil of the day-to-day world, consisted of the eternal, the infinite, God.
The more the self disappeared, the closer one came to the truth and to God, he rationalized.
Theologically, these are not original thoughts and are shared by Buddhists, Hindus, and certain New Age enthusiasts of today. But Amiel's conclusions are not the result of meditation or religious training. He feels the absence of an individual self, and, at times, this translates into an illusive but heart-felt connection with the Infinite. While he eloquently voices the importance of this distinctly non-European point of view, one is not always sure whether he is trying to convince the reader or himself.

"Be everything while being nothing." Amiel writes, early in the journal, ''effacing thyself, letting God enter into thee as the air enters an empty vessel, reducing the ego to the mere vessel which contains the divine essence."3 Most of his language is less preachy—less a justification of the empty feeling he is unable to shake. Reflecting on an afternoon meeting with some fellow intellectuals, Amiel makes a keen observation that is more typical of his prose: "Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be" (p. 84).

While many of Amiel's written observations are highly quotable and are used by writers and scholars to this day, his journal consistently and elo-quently expresses the experience of chronic, lifelong clepersonalization above all else. In this regard, Amiel's story is best captured by excerpts from his journal:

I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age. . . . I am, a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis; an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me—and this phenomenol-ogy of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. . . .

What is it which has always come between real life and me? What glass screen has, as it were, interposed itself between me and the enjoyment, the possession, the contact of things, leaving me only the role of the looker-on? False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. Fatal results of timidity, aggravated by intellectual delusion! Fear, too, has had a large share in it—Lapeurde ce que j'aime esl ma fatalile. [The fear of what I love is my fatality] (vol. 1, p.liii, vol. 2 p. 145)

This sentiment in many ways reflects the behavior of some chronically depersonalized people, whose robotic actions stem from inhibition—a desire to act and appear normal for fear that bursts of creativity, eccentricities, or iconoclastic behavior might in fact be symptomatic of insanity or might reveal to others some kind of secret mental problem. As a result, many depersonalized people live more conservatively than they would otherwise. For Amiel, robotlike behavior is a matter of going through the motions of his job and private literary exercises that never blossom into a literary statement beyond the confines of his journal.

In the 1880s Amiel began to express frustration at the lack of achievement that resulted from his obsessive self-examination.

I am afraid of greatness. All my published literary essays, therefore, are little else than studies, games, exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, as it were: I run up and down my instrument, I train my hand, and make sure of its capacity and skill. But the work itself remains unachieved. My effort expires, and, satisfied with the power to act, I never arrive at the will to act, I am always preparing and never accomplishing and my energy is swallowed up in a kind of barren curiosity. . . I understand myself, but I do not approve myself, (vol. 1, p. 90.)

Unfortunately for this gentle, sensitive man, instead of being instilled by his intelligence and insight with a sense of confidence and faith, his chronic introspection brought only loneliness, regret, and self-contradiction. He fills the journal with some entries that praise the value of ego-death, wrhile other entries decry his lack of ambition and motivation and the mediocrity of his accomplishments in the academic and literary world. This dichotomy between earthly ambition and selfless, eternal unification with God, locked him in a kind of "analysis paralysis" his entire life.

Amiel became a fussy perfectionist, and because he couldn't write the perfect novel, he didn't write one at all. Because he couldn't find the perfect wife, he never married. And through it all, he obsessed about existence itself, convinced of how little his life in the world mattered because he never really felt himself to be part of it.

Mrs. Humphrey Ward, a noted literati of the time, and the translator of Amiel's work, says in her 1906 introduction:

There were certain characteristics in Amiel wdiich made it [success] impossible—which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as his public performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. . . . All of the pleasant paths which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, in which so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amiel straight into the wilderness of abstract speculation.

Perhaps. But his writing also revealed an exceptional degree of self-awareness and truth. In May 1880, Amiel wrote:

Inadaptability, clue either to mysticism or stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune . . . the characteristic of my life. I have not been able to fit myself to anything, to content myself with anything. I have never had the quantum of illusion necessary for risking the irreparable. I have made use of the ideal itself to keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with marriage; only per-fection would have satisfied me; and, on the other hand, I was not worthy of perfection. . . . So that, finding no satisfaction in things, I tried to extirpate desire, by which things enslave us. Independence has been my refuge; detachment my stronghold. I have lived the impersonal life—in the world, yet not in it, thinking much, desiring nothing. It is a state of mind which corresponds with what in women is called a broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since the characteristic common to both is despair. When one knows that one will never possess what one could have loved, and that one can be content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left the world, one has cut the golden hair, parted with all that makes hu-man life—that is to say, illusion—the incessant effort towards an apparently attainable end. (vol. 2, p. 288)

Amiel is virtually incapable of the self-deceptions that ''normal" people utilize for survival or in striving toward worldly goals set by their individual egos. It has been impossible for him to play act in a day-to-day world that seems pointless and unreal.

Near the end of some 30 years of philosophical comments, in his 50s, Amiel provides the reader with some important insight into the origins of his lifelong state of mind:

Since the age of 16 onwards I have been able to look at things with the eyes of a blind man recently operated upon. That is to say, I have been able to suppress in myself the results of the long education of sight, and to abolish distances; and now I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? No. Madness means the impossibility of recovering one's normal balance after the mind has thus played truant among alien forms of being, and followed Dante to invisible worlds. Madness means incapacity for self-judgement and self-control. Whereas it seems to me that my mental transformations are but philosophical experiences, (vol 2, p. 304; emphasis in original)

In this paragraph, Amiel unintentionally gives birth to the term that is the subject of this book, while exhibiting the "reality testing" that addition-ally marks the condition. Ludovic Dugas, and others, picking up on the term, which fit so well with their Amiel-like patients, took all that he wrote quite literally. As J.C. Nemiah, MD, said, What is of particular interest in the journal entry quoted [above] is Amiel's awrareness that his capacity for insight into his condition was maintained throughout all the alterations of his perceptions of himself and the world. He also recognized that no matter how bizarre his experiences were, the preservation of insight kept them clearly out of the realm of madness. . . . Amiel's perceptive introspection revealed to him a clinical truth about depersonalization that remains a central element of the modern concept of the disorder: Patients have a keen and unfailing awareness of the disturbances in their sense of reality. . . .There appears in depersonalization to he a heightening of the psychic energy invested in the self-observing ego, the mental function on which rests the capacity for insight.5 Some contemporary psychiatrists have suggested that Dugas and others took Amiel too literally. The Journal Inline is more philosophic than symptomatic of a syndrome, they contend. But patients who have been exposed to the whole life-changing aspects of the condition would strongly disagree.

Elena Bezubbova is a psychiatrist who has studied depersonalization in Russia, treating more than 100 patients. She has also become an authority on many of the underlying themes of depression and detachment in Russian literature. As she points out,

Amiel exhibits the things that are psycho-pathologically primordial about depersonalization—the existential essence of the experience. Depersonalization is one of the very few, if not the only state, which discloses the basic, elementary fabric of being, the feeling of this fabric, the experience of this fabric. The tragedy is that depersonalization discloses itself in a "negative form," as absence, such as inner pain after an amputation, which still tells us about something we once had, but lost. With depersonalization the individual does not know exactly what he had, but still experiences something that is 'lost." That is why depersonalization can be so painfully hopeless, groundless. That is why there are no words to express because literally, there are no words in language to express it.

Still, Amiel, and others that followed, came as close as language permits, and often, what seems like ethereal prose or languid self-pity to some people is in fact poignant, insightful, and a great comfort to others striving to put their own confounding sensations into words.

Ironically, through his private diary, Amiel accomplished some of the recognition that eluded him all his life. Today he is well known in Europe, and he even has a street named after him in France. More important, his themes of depersonalization and an inexplicable, egoless unification with the infinite, pleasant or not, were destined to repeat themselves in other, far different written works of the century to come. The significance of the dissipation of the self would gain more interest for mass audience in the twentieth century, when it would be opened to numerous new voices.

Feeling Unreal
Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self
Daphne Simeon, MD Jeffrey Abugel