Dictionary:

alienation

  (āl'yə-nā'shən, ā'lē-ə-)

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1. The act of alienating or the condition of being alienated; estrangement: Alcoholism often leads to the alienation of family and friends.
2. Emotional isolation or dissociation.
3. Law. The act of transferring property or title to it to another.

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In real property law, the voluntary transfer of Title and Possession of Real Property to another person. The law recognizes the power to alienate (or transfer) property as an essential ingredient of Fee-Simple ownership of property and generally prohibits unreasonable restraints on alienation.

To convey or transfer Title and Possession of property. May be voluntary (by the owner) or involuntary (without the owner's consent) such as in Condemnation.
Example: By signing a Deed there is an alienation of property.

noun

1. The act of estranging or the condition of being estranged: disaffection, estrangement. See love/hatred.
2. An interruption in friendly relations: breach, break, disaffection, estrangement, fissure, rent, rift, rupture, schism, split. See assemble/disassemble, help/harm/harmless.
3. Serious mental illness or disorder impairing a person's capacity to function normally and safely: brainsickness, craziness, dementia, derangement, disturbance, insaneness, insanity, lunacy, madness, mental illness, psychopathy, unbalance. Psychiatry mania. Psychology aberration. See sane/insane.
4. A making over of legal ownership or title: Law assignment, conveyance, grant, transfer, transferal. See law.

Definition: unfriendliness
Antonyms: charm, endearment, friendliness

The estrangement, or separation of individuals from one another, so that they do not identify with each other as a group. Thus, K. Marx (1844, 1975) argued that it was employers who enjoyed the products of industry, rather than the workers who actually made the goods; under capitalism, workers become appendages of the machine they use rather than whole people.

The psychological state of alienation is said to include isolation, powerlessness, and meaninglessness, and, not surprisingly, has been linked with state-owned industries just as much, if not more than, with capitalism, since no identifiable person owns a state industry.

The concept of alienation has been used to explain the rise of urban problems such as violent football fans, street gangs, and alcohol and drug addiction.

The root meaning of ‘alienation’ denoted a relationship to property. One could, for example, alienate one's property by transferring it to another person, or to an institution. During the seventeenth century, the focus of the term shifted from material to immaterial possessions such as rights, and sovereignty over oneself. It came to be accepted by thinkers such as Grotius and Locke that alienating certain rights or powers was a necessary prerequisite for legitimate political society. Alienation in this sense became the basis of social contract theory.

A more recent sense connoted a loss of reason or personality, so that one was alienated or estranged from one's true or rational self through mental disorder (‘alienist’ is an obsolete word for a psychiatrist). In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Paine argued, for example, that certain rights were not just accidental to human character, but essential. Hence such rights were ‘inalienable’, and to lose such rights either by giving them away or by having them removed against one's will, was to lose an essential part of one's humanity.

Although Rousseau did not specifically use the term, the first systematic account of alienation by a political theorist is to be found in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). Here, alienation is uncompromisingly a condition of developed society, where systems of law—moral/religious, political and economic—rob one of the responsibility of setting the parameters of one's own liberty. Under such conditions one will remain alienated from one's potential, moral self, unless and until one can reconstruct society to enable one to participate in the setting of such boundaries. The Social Contract (1762) proposes one form which such a society might take.

The most important accounts of alienation from the point of view of political theory are those of Hegel and Marx. Hegel believed the purpose of history to be the progressive overcoming of the gap between the particular consciousness and the universal consciousness until a final unity of the two is achieved (absolute self-consciousness). This gap between the particular and the universal constitutes, for Hegel, a central and necessary element of alienation. History is therefore the story of humanity's progress towards freedom from alienation. For Hegel, alienation is through and through a historical concept.

Marx accepts this latter point, but (under the influence of Feuerbach) rejects Hegel's emphasis on consciousness for two main reasons. First, it implies that alienation originates within the individual, whereas for Marx alienation originates in the material conditions of existence—the ‘ensemble of social relations’—within which the individual is enmeshed. Second, Hegel's view makes the individual responsible for his or her own release from alienation, since all that is required is an effort of will. For Marx, overcoming alienation requires a change in the material conditions of productive social existence, and such a change cannot be wrought by individuals. Alienation, for Marx, must therefore be overcome by the activity of a historically specific class.

Marx believes humanity to be capable of producing freely and creatively, overcoming the tyranny of immediate, basic needs that characterizes the rest of the animal kingdom. Under conditions which enable free, creative production, one's personality can be expressed in the objects one produces. This investing of oneself in one's products is a form of alienation, but it is a positive form. It must exist wherever and whenever human beings freely create things, including communist society. But where the conditions for free, creative production do not exist alienation will become distorted into negative forms.

Under capitalism, for instance, factory work (through the division of labour) turns labour from a social activity into an individuated process, alienating workers from each other. Factory work dehumanizes workers by giving them repetitive tasks which require no free, creative input. Thus workers are alienated from their human potential. The products one produces fail any longer to express one's personality. For Marx, then, the superseding of capitalism is a necessary prerequisite for ridding alienation of its distorted elements.

Since Marx, writers across a number of disciplines have developed accounts of alienation, notably in existentialist philosophy (Sartre), social psychology (Erich Fromm), and various hybrids of Marxism (Marcuse's psychoanalytic version, for example). As a result of its dissemination across a range of disciplines, the term has been loosely applied to describe the sometimes debilitating effects of life in modern, large-scale societies.

— Alan Apperley

For more information on alienation, visit Britannica.com.

The transfer of title to real property by one person to another.

A pivotal concept in the philosophical writings of Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx, and subsequent writings in both idealist and Marxist traditions. Alienation (German Entfremdung, also translatable as estrangement) is centrally the idea of something being separated from or strange to something else: I am self-alienated in so far as I cannot understand or accept myself; thought is alienated from reality in so far as it inadequately reflects it; I am alienated from my desires in so far as they are not authentically my own, but assail me as it were from without; I am alienated from the results of my labour in so far as they become commodities; and I may be alienated from my society in so far as I feel controlled by it, rather than part of a social unity that creates it. In Hegel the progress towards the Absolute is one of the growth of self consciousness, itself a process of ‘dealienation’ whereby what is separate and falsely objectified regains its unity through self-creation and self-consciousness (although finite minds, the agency of this growth, alienate themselves in activity and in the ‘objectification’ of their material and social products). In Feuerbach, by contrast, the absolutist trappings of Hegelian alienation are abandoned, and the concept is replaced by self-alienation, a condition to be overcome by the self-consciousness that proper relations with our own activities and products brings. Marx's use of the concept is sometimes thought to separate his early, Hegelian, period from the later writings, but there seems little doubt about his permanent attachment to the idea of a human nature as self-alienated so long as the communist transformation of society has not taken place. See also anomie, authenticity, Dasein, false consciousness.

Inscribed in the opposition between the Same and the Other, alienation describes the condition of the subject who no longer recognizes himself, or rather can only recognize himself via the Other. The philosophical background of this concept derives from Hegel and then Marx. Classical psychiatry used the term to classify any mental illness in which the subject no longer knew who he was. Thanks to Jacques Lacan's study of Hegel's master/slave dialectic, the term no longer refers only to mental alienation, but retains the meaning it has in philosophy.

For Lacan, who followed Hegel on this point, human desire is constituted by mediation: "Man's desire finds its meaning in the other's desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, but because his first objective is to be recognized by the other" (Lacan, p. 58). Specifically, the objective is to be recognized by the Other as a desiring subject, because the first desire is to have one's desire recognized. The conclusion is Lacan's well-known formula: "Man's desire is the desire of the Other," which doesn't mean that one desires another as object, but that one desires another desire, and wants to have one's own desire recognized by the Other. This is an echo of Hegel's master/slave dialectic (a struggle for pure prestige) where each consciousness wants to be recognized by the Other without recognizing it in turn ("each consciousness seeks the death of the other").

In this fight to the death, the one who accepts death in order to win becomes the Master; the other will become the slave. But the Master is taken in a trap, for he owes his status to the recognition of a slave-consciousness. The slave, however, will be liberated by the Master as his work extracts from things the consciousness of self that was lost in the struggle. The slave will end up, in the Marxist perspective, transforming the world in such a way that there is no place for the Master.

Thus the theme of alienation in Lacan refers to what is called a forced choice, or vel, which is the Latin word expressing an alternative where it is impossible to maintain two terms at once. The vel is alienating in that it gives a false choice, a forced choice ("your money or your life," "me or you"). The Master's freedom, which must pass through death to attain consciousness of self, is no freedom. Lacan derived several consequences from this structure of alternative, particularly in his critique of the Cartesian cogito, by indicating that thought and being cannot coincide. Thus, "I am where I do not think" and "it thinks there where I am not."

Piera Aulagnier also took up the notion of alienation, but even though she borrowed from Lacan the relation of desire to the Other, her view more closely approached Freud's thinking about collective hypnosis and its relation to the ego ideal. However, she worked in an entirely different context, refusing to make alienation one of the givens of human existence, but instead seeing it as one of the ways the psyche attempts to resolve conflict. First, she defined the notion of alienation by its goal, which is "to strive for a non-conflictual state, to abolish all causes of conflict between the identifying subject and the object of identification, between the I and its ideals" (Aulagnier, 1979). Thus she connects the notion to the aims of Thanatos, as a "desire for non-desire" and it can then be used in fields as diverse as collective psychology, passionate love, gambling, and drug addiction.

Nevertheless, Piera Aulagnier insists that alienation rests on an encounter between the desire for self-alienation, on the one hand, and the desire to alienate, on the other. The process of alienation seeks to erase the tension arising from this difference, whether it involves a subject that seeks to identify himself with the object identified, or a subject that wants to bring together the self image that comes back to him from others and the others themselves. Thus alienation appears to be a pathological modality, like neurosis or psychosis, that attempts to regulate the conflict between identifying subject and the object identified. Whereas the neurotic differentiates between his self and its idealization and the psychotic posits the latter as realized in a delusion, the alienated subject idealizes an other who provides him with certainty. Unable to make these ideals a spur to progress, alienation produces a short circuit through the mediation of an idealized force. Alienation becomes even more effective when the alienated subject misapprehends "the accident occurring in his or her thought" (Aulagnier, 1979). It is as though this subject, once a prisoner, no longer has the objectivity needed to judge the situation.

In cases where a group feels alienated, not only is a group of subjects oppressed by a group of masters, but oppression infiltrates all relationships within the group. "Thus whatever the position one may occupy at the moment, every subject is both a victim and a potential murderer, given that one could always find oneself in the opposite position a moment later" (Aulagnier, 1979). If Jacques Lacan is indebted to Hegel, Piera Aulagnier leans on Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, both of whom revisit the historical experiences that have left their mark on the twentieth century, the Holocaust and the gulag.

But how does it happen that the subject chooses one outcome of alienation, rather than another? Piera Aulagnier would start from the metapsychological perspective on the conflict between the identifying subject and the object identified. This conflict is inscribed at the heart of a pathological relation to the ideal ego and to the ideal agencies in general. Alienation is characterized (as is psychosis, but in a different way) by an asymmetry between the I and its object, with no reciprocity between what the one recognizes and what the other recognizes. Thus a dominant pole is created (passionate investment in an object, the God-drug, Chance) by means of which the subject's response will be alienated from the object that is seen as invulnerable; conversely the psychotic, who also recognizes the asymmetry in the relation, is going to try to flee from it and create outside of it a delusional object of identification that others refuse to recognize.

The notion of alienation as Piera Aulagnier conceives of it allowed for a reconsideration the nosographical categories. She particularly opened up a domain for renewed investigations on the question of addictions and on the perversions.

Bibliography

Aulagnier, Piera. (1979). Les destins du plaisir: aliénation, amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. InÉcrits: a selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1953)

Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1998). Penser la psychose. Une lecture de l'œuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.

Palmier, Jean-Michel. (1969). Lacan. Paris:Éditions universitaires.

Further Reading

Bychowski, Gustav. (1967). The archaic object and alienation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48, 384393.

Khan, Masud. (1979). Alienation in perversions. New York: International Universities Press.

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

In the law of real property, the voluntary and absolute transfer of title and possession of real property from one person to another. The law recognizes the power to alienate property as one of the essential ingredients of fee simple ownership and therefore unreasonable restraints on alienation are generally prohibited as contrary to public policy. See 169 U.S. 353. See restrictive covenant. See also restraint on alienation; rule against perpetuities.

A feeling of separation or isolation. In social science, alienation is associated with the problems caused by rapid social change, such as industrialization and urbanization (see Industrial Revolution), which has broken down traditional relationships among individuals and groups and the goods and services they produce.

Isolation or separation from the standard.

Quotes:

"The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical." - Eugenio Montale

"Without alienation, there can be no politics." - Arthur Miller

"Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings." - R. D. Laing

"We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt." - R. D. Laing

"There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation." - Eugene Ionesco

"Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals." - Vaclav Havel

See more famous quotes about Alienation

Alienation may refer to:

• Alienation (property law), the legal transfer of title of ownership to another party
• "Alienation", the medical term for splitting apart of the faculties of the mind
• Social alienation, the individual subject's estrangement from its community, society, or world
• Marx's theory of alienation, the separation of things that naturally belong together, or antagonism between things that are properly in harmony
• Alienation effect, a theatrical and cinematic device by which the audience is "alienated" from a play or film

See also

• Alien Nation (film and TV series)

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