The dominant meaning is that of the
existentialists, who used the term to characterize the feeling of loss of self
or of personal identity, the sense that one is but a number in a computer memory
bank, or mere cog in a blundering, dehumanized, social machine. In psychiatric
terms, it represents an emotional disorder in which there is a loss of contact
with one's own personal reality, accompanied by feelings of strangeness and an
unreality of experience. In severe cases, parts of one's body feel alien or
altered in size and one may have the experience of perceiving oneself from a
distance.