Basically, alienation is a very typical psychic condition that can affect people and that consists of the loss of reason, either temporarily, that is, the disorder lasts a little longer and then the person manages to restore their normal mental state. Or, failing that, it may be a permanent alienation that will affect the individual forever.
The adjective alienated is applied to those who have lost their mental faculties. In fact, alienated means alien and comes from the Latin alien. If someone is alien to him, this implies that his reasoning suffers an alteration. This approach is advocated by psychiatry, a discipline that uses the term alienated as a synonym for dementia. On the contrary, psychoanalysis defends the idea that the alienated individual is one who believes that he has convictions that actually originate in his unconscious or in repressive elements that go beyond his own will.
The alienated person is characterized by the loss of identity, this means that the individual suppresses his personality and then becomes malleable to what the external world indicates and proposes. He will not act according to his own being but will act in a completely opposite way as a consequence of the state of alienation.
This concept has been approached from different angles, sociology, religion and, obviously, psychology, among other disciplines, has dealt with this phenomenon.
Some Christian thinkers consider the original sin with which man was born an expression of human alienation. Man has ceased to be what he is and has become another. It is a state of alienation, a kind of madness of which the individual is not aware.
Meanwhile, the German philosopher Karl Marx was one of the most interested in this situation, spreading it through his writings and speeches.
Marx argued that private property was the main cause of the alienation suffered by the lowest and most oppressed social stratum of a society. In other words, the existence of social classes and the proposed differentiation is what triggers alienation in those who are at the lowest level of it.
