Neurosis

Introduction: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that emerges due to severe stressful events including flood, earthquakes, war, aggression, etc. Due to the nature of their job, firefighters are at high risk of developing complications and psychiatric problems, including PTSD. The present study was carried out aiming to compare self-differentiation and neurosis among firefighters with and without PTSD. Methods: The PTSD checklist developed by Weathers et al. was distributed among 180 firefighters directly active in the fire of the Plasco building in Tehran, Iran, in 2017. From among these individuals, 30 people with and 30 without PTSD were selected randomly. The participants completed the Differentiation of Self Inventory (DSI) developed by Skowron and Dendy and the Neuroticism Scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). Findings: There were no significant differences in terms of the components of emotional cutoff (EC) (F=0.973, P>0.05), emotional reactivity (F=0.404, P> 0.05), fusion with others (FO) (F = 0.338, P > 0.05), and I-position (F = 0.774, P > 0.05) between firefighters with and without PTSD. In addition, there were no significant differences in terms of neurosis between firefighters with and without PTSD (F= 0.034, P>0.05). Conclusion: Being in highly stressful circumstances for a long duration of time (about 10 days) and cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors seem to expose this statistical sample to PTSD. Moreover, in the firefighting recruitment process, complete medical examinations are performed, which can be the reason for the low and equal levels of neurosis and differentiation of self in all individuals with and without PTSD.

This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze’s philosophy and in particular the question of desert(ed) islands. Running throughout this section is a consistent concern with empathy and sociality, with the changing structure of alterity in the identified movement from neurosis, psychosis to perversion. In this section I make the argument that several forms of contemporary philosophy are carrying out acts of philosophical autism with regards to species extinction and the question of the absence of the other. I try to counter this trend in the second part of the paper where there is a concern with thinking the structure “Us-without-world,” which is my original contribution. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, in the time of our forced solitude, in the time of our intoxication with technology, there is a real problem of the life-world, of thinking we-experience in common life, in this new hermetic reality. This is encapsulated in the thought-experiment of the structure “Us-without-world”.