Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🧘 Loss of self 🤝 Selflessness 🤝 To act selflessly
unself

unself

9.9
A state of losing awareness of who you are and your actions
  • noun
  • /ʌnˈsɛlf/
  • Specialized
translation icon : despersonalización

Examples

  • These were middle-class women, the wives of businessmen, academics, and professional men, themselves university-educated, who, with complete unself-consciousness, were practicing a very old-fashioned kind of direct charity.

    Academic text (1992)

  • In a moment of unself, she connected with the audience, forgetting her own identity.

  • His unself during the charity event revealed a genuine compassion for those in need.

  • The artist displayed a remarkable unself, losing herself completely in the creative process.

Synonyms

disassociation
vsunself
  • Specialized
3 8.4

A mental state where part of a person's memory or feelings feels separate

is about losing awareness of identity rather than a partial split of experience
dissociation
vsunself
  • Specialized
3 8.7

A mental state in which a person feels separated from themselves or their memories

focuses on losing awareness of identity rather than forming separate acting parts
depersonalization
vsunself
  • Specialized
1 9.9

A person feels detached from themselves and their identity

is the general state of losing awareness of identity rather than a formal disorder
depersonalization neurosis
vsunself
  • Archaic
9.9

A long-lasting feeling of being detached from yourself and from who you are, often with numb emotions

is a state of losing awareness of identity without chronic clinical recurrence

How Developed

self
∞ 3.9
unself
  • Specialized
9.9

Surface Forms

unself singular
unselfs plural

Morphology

unself = self (semi-transparent) = un + self

The negative prefix 'un-' combined with 'self' yields a concept related to 'not-self' but the sense here (psychological loss of identity) is a specialized, non-literal state that is not directly inferable by all learners.

Etymology

Unself is made from un- ('not') and self ('your own identity'), so it paints the image of your usual 'self' fading away, like in deep meditation or when you are completely absorbed in a task. So, unself describes a state when someone loses awareness of their own identity and feels calm or all-focused.