Alienation

Introduction

Though philosophers and sociologists had been familiar with it for some time, the concept of alienation only entered the discourse of the mental health professions in the mid-1950s. It gained considerable currency through the 1960s and 1970s, spawning a vast and (sometimes) illuminating literature. Some authors of the Cold War era talked loosely of alienation, especially among the young, in purely conventional terms, i.e., as a symptom of disappointment, mistrust, or developmental arrest – of maladjustment to a relatively benign or even admirably “rational” social order. With rare exceptions, literature is quite trivial and of little or no use here. By contrast, those who embraced the idea of alienation in a critical fashion tended to stress the fundamental irrationalityof the prevailing social order. They saw the adjusted state of the average individual in late-capitalist society, i.e., normality, as one of self-estrangement and of reification in human relationships....