Traveling to distant worlds, leaving behind established roles, and venturing into spaces filled with expectation and promise – this is the pivot of a fragile happiness and at the same time a perilous moment of emotional failure. For nowhere is the fragility of the self more evident than in travel: decisions made, relationships formed, the life lived – all of this can become unbalanced at the threshold of the unfamiliar. Jens Clausen intertwines literary travel accounts with psychological aspects and explores the question of how people lose their sense of self while traveling. Anxiety and panic attacks create uncertainty, dissociations alter perception, depression renders one inactive, and psychoses confront one with the difficulty of inner and outer boundaries. Writers such as Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Schw.