Tenth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

The paper focuses on the often dislocating, foreign impression that encountering disability in another can create for non-disabled people. Applying Freud’s (1919) concept of the uncanny to the experience of disability, the paper argues that disabled people may be experienced simultaneously as familiar and as yet strange by non-disabled others. Specifically, the paper explores the phenomenon of the uncanny for the author who is visibly physically disabled. I have Achondroplasia, disproportionate dwarfism. Since my disability is forever visibly present, it is argued that the gaze of others provokes a particular response in me, since others experience my disabled self as unfamiliar resulting in me seeing my own self through the eyes of the other. The paper thus addresses the public, social and interpsychic aspects of living with a physical disability, which in turn have a strong impact on intrapsychic aspects. Arguably, disabled people’s subjectivities are constantly threatened because of other people’s responses to their disabled selves. Disabled people are faced with the “unremitting, pathologising violence of the non-disabled gaze” (Hughes, 2009, p. 406), creating an experience of psychoemotional disablism. The paper includes a discussion on how the disabled author attempts to manage these various feelings of discomfort and complex experiences so as to maintain a sense of psychological wellness.