Fictions of depersonalization: inauthentic feeling at the fin-de-siècle

In contemporary psychiatry, depersonalization is understood as an experience of unreality, and detachment from one’s mind, self, body, or surroundings; it is also strongly associated with a loss of emotional reactivity. This article investigates the development of this concept in psychiatry and literary fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the concept back to the Journal Intime by the poet and scholar Henri-Frédéric Amiel, connecting Amiel’s statements with Ludovic Dugas’s later psychiatric account of depersonalization, as well as the accounts of unreality and inauthenticity that are described in the works of Mary Augusta Ward, Oscar Wilde and George Moore. These literary writers fasten experiences that we would now recognise as depersonalization to cultural concerns about aestheticism and gender. Such a practice, the article argues, holds positive and cautionary lessons for twenty-first century culture. Nineteenth-century fictions of depersonalization can help us to see beyond psychiatric understandings of depersonalization and envision the experience as a source of phenomenological discovery; they also instruct us to be attentive to the relationships between psychological suffering and personal style. Finally, the article argues that the discourse around depersonalization offers insight into a tension between two nineteenth-century models of selfhood: one in which the emotions are significant but extraneous, and one in which emotional experience is foundational