Abstract

This chaper discusses homelessness from the perspective of the corporeal consciousness. Psychologists such as Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud report and discuss a strange psychological state of Unheimliche. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan elaborate and analyze this alienating strangeness in our experience of the self and the world. Since the German word Heim means home, Unheimliche refers to a state of homelessness or unhomeliness. Unheimliche is often translated into English as uncanniness. Uncanniness refers to the disturbing and puzzling experience of familiarly unfamiliar images or scenes. It is a mode of experience that reveals the in-between-ness of human existence and the primordial anxiety that derive from the dual nature of the body, i.e., the body as both an object of perception and a subject of feeling. From the perspective of the fundamental corporeality and the externalizing intimacy of human existence and consciousness, the author will argue that lived experience of uncanniness or homelessness is one of the intriguing aspects of human psychology and humane existence, caused by the continuous cycle of the familiarizing and the alienating processes of the intrinsically embodied mind. The conscious mind is living in this dual image of going home and going out to the world as it experiences the familiarly unfamiliar self that is intrinsically corporeal. The author will explain and analyze the homelessness and uncanniness from the viewpoint of the duality of corporeal consciousness.