Stranger in the Mirror: Exploring Somatic Defamiliarization

This study explores the centrality of the senses for the maintenance or disruption of people’s commonsensical familiarity with the world. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people affected by depersonalization/derealization, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as a dissociative condition in which people perceive the world as dream-like, I conceptualize what I term somatic defamiliarization. I define somatic defamiliarization as a process whereby people experience previously unquestioned sensory phenomena, such as mundane objects or their bodies, as unfamiliar. Building on Berger and Luckmann’s work, I contend that somatic defamiliarization is a perpetual, albeit latent, condition of social life that threatens reality maintenance. I discuss how the concept of somatic defamiliarization can be applied to explore the somatic qualities of experiential ruptures that people may undergo in various circumstances, such as immigration or war.