Carl Gustav Jung was a famous Swiss psychiatrist and one of the founding fathers of modern depth psychology. Jung’s concepts have had a deep influence not only on psychology but also on philosophy and the arts. In one of his famous books, The Undiscovered Self, Jung remarks on the subject of alienation writing, “After one observes and investigates the world around him, the task of adapting his psychic and technical resources to its peculiarities is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process. He then loses sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being.” The subject of alienation is, in fact, one of the central ideas of Karl Marx, a famous social scientist and the founding father of communism. Marx along with another social scientist, Eric Fromm, not only believe in this concept of alienation, but also think that it is a prevalent factor in today’s capitalist economy.
Being alienated from something means to be separate from that thing other than ourselves. It often results from passivity to something and results in feelings of surrender and submission. Marx and Fromm believe that three necessary situations need to take place in order for alienation to take place. In the first situation, one needs to notice another as “separate” than himself. Second, there needs to be an unequal power relation between the two entities. Third, there needs to be the recognition by the less powerful that it is on the weak side of the relationship. When these three situations occur at the same time, the relationship between the two is affected in a way in a way where the weaker one of the two experiences the “loss of self-worth.”
To help understand the concept of alienation and its effects, let us apply it to a situation. Say a troublesome man with nowhere to turn in life decides he is going to build an idol and when it is complete he will worship it. By building this idol and...