Illusionment and Disillusionment: Foundational Illusions and the Loss of a World

One can only be disillusioned if once one lived within illusions-and so disillusionment is always after the fact ( après coup or nachträglich), as illusions come into view even as they are crumbling within. With a crisis of disillusionment-or existential disillusionment-one falls away from a coherence of meaning, revealing a system of intertwined fundamental illusions that had always been lived within and implicit, part of one's being-in-the-world, and that now seem broken, strange, and uncanny. This way of being that one recognizes only retrospectively may be called "illusionment," a state of being apprehended in the very process of its falling apart. That is, prior to disillusionment, there may not have been an illusion as such; rather, there was some overall effective-enough, taken-for-granted coherence, an experience of world and being that now comes into view and seems broken precisely because it no longer holds together. For example, a sense of a common "we" might be revealed to be so flawed as to have been a fiction, a fantasy, a set of pervasive, interwoven illusions that one had once naively lived within as unquestioned beliefs. Severe disillusionment, then, carries with it a sense of falling out of the once taken-for-granted world, undermining a sense of solid existential grounding. Saturating all aspects of the psyche, traumatizing disillusionments may lead to a lifelong cascade of après coup attempts to find new grounding in how to live, as one attempts to repair this world-broken-ness.