Mediation and psychic distance
pp. 151-167
in: Felix Geyer, David Schweitzer (eds), Theories of alienation, Berlin, Springer, 1976Abstract
After the shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe lived alone on his Island of Despair for twenty-five years. He built his own house, made his own clothes, hunted, raised corn and milked his goats: he did everything necessary to sustain life and to satisfy it by himself. He had to make his own decisions concerning safety and the future, and having made them he had to carry them out. Even the luxury of a comfortable adopted theology was denied him: his interpretation of the Bible and his own condition, though conventional from the standpoint of the society that bred him, was spun with trouble out of his own brain.