I'm looking for a term I thought I once knew, but seem to have forgotten, describing a mental state. Something like ego overidentification, identity confusion, ego border dissolution????

The state is similar to undifferentiated(family)ego mass. It would descibe the condition when a person identifies strongly with a group, a hero, a movement, a political party, a job, a cult -- something external -- to a point where s/he expands and confuses the personal ego/identity with the external entity, or some conception of it, leading to a violation of personal borders and disintegration of a realistic self-concept. One comes to identify the self with the external.

I am not thinking of ego dystonia: it's not perceived dissonance of one's self-concept with reality, but the actual breakdown of the difference between self and not self (as might be posited as the state of a young infant, although not as perceptually extreme).

This seems so basic one might think it was a common term, but I can neither remember what the term is, if I indeed do remember there was one, nor can I find such term to describe this. Anyone know of it.

-- Blue Pilgrim (bluepilgrim@grics.net), October 06, 2004

Answers

I checked for possibilities in Hinsie and Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, which has multiple pages of terms related to ego.

You may be thinking merely of "loss of boundaries of the ego" which they equate with "cosmic identity"

Another possibility is "fragmentation of ego" which is equivalent to "dedifferentiation"

I would look at the dictionary if you can get your hands on it, as "escape from the ego" and "negation of the ego" also refer to some related symptoms.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@cox.net), October 07, 2004.