Isolation of affect
Neurotic defence (grouped by Vaillant under intellectualisation); mental inhibitions level on the DSM-IV scale; secondary in McWilliams' scheme. The person remembers and reports a painful event in full while the feeling that belongs to it is cut off.
What drives it
Keeps the facts available and the person working without being overwhelmed; surgeons, soldiers and crisis teams rely on it.
How it shows
Work
Describes a restructure that cost forty jobs, including a friend's, in the tone of a weather report. A calm, detailed account of how close the business came to collapse. Useful in a crisis, unsettling in a one-to-one. Listeners often feel the missing emotion themselves, sometimes strongly.
Relationships
Tells a partner about a parent's death or a brutal childhood flatly, then changes the subject. The partner feels shut out, or becomes the one who cries.
Self
You notice you're telling something that should hurt and feel nothing, or the feeling arrives days later, unattached, at an odd moment.
What tells it apart
Emotional numbing: Numbing flattens feeling across life after trauma or in depression; isolation is selective, attached to particular memories, while other feelings run normally.
Intellectualisation: Isolation reports bare facts without feeling; intellectualisation wraps them in theory and abstraction.
Dissociation (including depersonalisation and derealisation): Dissociation alters the sense of self or reality and can leave gaps in memory; isolation leaves memory and self intact and removes only the feeling.
A test
Ask them to slow down at the most painful point of the story; isolation shows as no change in voice or body, sometimes followed by irritation at being slowed.
Questions to carry
- At the most painful point of the story, what changes in their voice or body?
- Which painful event can I tell in full detail without feeling any of it?
How strong the research is
clinical. Reliably rated in defence research and well described in obsessional patients; the mechanism itself is little tested.
Where it comes from
Sigmund Freud, 1926; Anna Freud, 1936
On the family tree: Sigmund Freud