The False Self and Derealization

🧶 Tags:: #literature_Notes
🗃 Resources:: Dopamine Nation (2021)
2026-06-10

When our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we've created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization. It's a terrifying feeling, which commonly contributes to thoughts of suicide. After all, if we don't feel real, ending our lives feels inconsequential.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the concept of "the false self" in the 1960s. According to Winnicott, the false self is a self-constructed persona in defense against intolerable external demands and stressors. Winnicott postulated that the creation of the false self can lead to feelings of profound emptiness. No there there. Social media has contributed to the problem of the false self by making it far easier for us, and even encouraging us, to curate narratives of our lives that are far from reality.