ABSTRACT
Harvey illuminates the experience of the uncanny gaze in the non-disabled person who encounters a child with a physical difference. As the mother of a child with Moebius Syndrome, whose face looked visibly different from birth, I find Harvey’s observation that “the mother’s sense of self, and her own feelings of unfamiliarity within herself, never quite settle because her subjectivity is constantly disrupted by others’ responses to her child . . . amplifying her own ambivalence” makes psychological sense of my unique maternal experience.
I will describe my maternal self experience in greater depth with reference to maternal gazes, including the loving empathic mother and “the uncanny” ambivalent (m)other, contextualized by Winnicott’s template of the mother’s face as a mirror for the baby’s image of herself. My daughter’s writings and vignettes will provide a window into how a creatively astute yet vulnerable child works with her experience of alienation, rebellion, and reparation, like her attraction to superheroes, Beauty and the Beast, and The Uncanny X-Men and how her loving and assertive gaze helped her mother. Finally, I will examine the way these subjective maternal experiences have contributed to my analytic sensibility and view of difference in my clinical work.
