Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 11

and I must recognize his or her otherness. And the other side of this recognized otherness is the identity, the possibility of recognizing oneself in the other and of recognizing the other as similar to oneself despite this difference. The announcement of the children’s deafness puts the hearing parents in a situation of frustration linked to the image they make of the deafness of the deaf child in relation to the values and the sociocultural standards. This frustration leads to a conflict between the different instances of the psyche, a conflict between the "Ego", the "Overself" in relation to the "Reality". For Freud (1988), the "id" is the pole of impulsive representatives where the instinctual desires are located. This conflict also results between the "id" and the "reality". The ideal so much wanted by the parents which is the request of the unconscious (id), is confronted with the "Reality" which is the deafness (disability) present in the child. To find oneself in front of a handicapped child is to enter into the dissatisfaction of one's desire as a father or mother. The deaf child does not represent the ideal so much wanted, which is for them a narcissistic attack. In fact, mothers expect behaviours from their children that do not happen, they expect a reaction when they speak, when they pronounce the name of their child, etc. The non-answer of the child causes frustration to the mother. To accept the deaf child as similar to oneself is to accept deafness with all its consequences. To reject deafness as a difference is to reject the child who is, in fact, a continuity of one's own body or image. The experience of the child's disability collected in this study is in fact the observable manifestations of these conflicts in the parents. Faced with this situation, the psyche is unable to carry out its usual task, which is to integrate the elements of the external world. To fight against this conflict, the psyche adopts as a defense mechanism the denial of the reality; this is expressed in the hearing parents by the refusal of the deafness diagnosis. When we meet a person with a disability, we recognize a distortion, which is not part of the representations that we have constructed for ourselves (in the Overself). These representations distort, clash with their representations of the normal and the real. When parents are told that their child is deaf, they find themselves "speechless". Faced with a child who cannot hear, they no longer know how to communicate. They often give up speaking, because they are no longer heard, and they see no reason to continue using it. They then lose their own speech towards their deaf child, not knowing how to address the one they believe to be locked in silence. This explains the painful experience of parent-deaf child communication. The socio-cultural representations that parents make of their child's deafness are in fact one of the defense mechanisms of their intrapsychic conflict, which is nothing more than a projection outside of denial. Andolfi, Angelo, Penghi and Nicolo (1987) consider the family as a system in perpetual change, whose evolution is determined by its capacity to abandon stability and then recover it by reorganizing itself. Usually or naturally, the arrival of a child in a family is the source of this change or disorganization. The presence of the child in the family generates a problem; the presence of a handicapped child accentuates this disorganization, and weakens the family system even more. This conflict testifies to the relational difficulties of hearing parents of a deaf child (rejection from the surroundings, conflicts within the couple...). The arrival of a child in general, and that of a disabled child in particular, is considered from the point of view of this theory as extrinsic sources of change in the family equilibrium. Faced with this situation (the child's disability), the hearing parents of a deaf child become rigid. This situation creates the psychological suffering that these parents experience. In doing so, the families do not put into practice their property of dynamism to maintain their equilibrium that underlines this theory of family psychopathology. The psychological suffering of these parents is only a radical refusal to any new experience on their part. They neglect this property in the face of the child's handicap (the child's deafness) within their family. The disease in Africans has an autonomous existence, independently of the organism that supports it and that it attacks from outside. In order for the attack or aggression to reach the individual, the aggressor must be closer, i.e. have a blood link with the ego. In Sow's (1971) theory of Black African psychopathology, the African personality is the individual (Ego) and the poles or axes that link them. Pathogenesis is the conflict between the ego and one of its three founding poles, which are the vertical pole, the horizontal pole and the Bio-Lineage Existence (BLE). We can say that the socio-cultural representations of the hearing parents of this study are external manifestations of the conflicts between the parents' egos and the different axes that link them. The vertical axis constitutes the supreme being, the founding ancestor. The BLE is the bio-lineage essence. (H) horizontal axis is the extended society. The ideas of bewitchment, punishment linked to a transgression, are emanations of the conflict between the horizontal axis (extended society) and the Ego. The horizontal axis defines all the relational configurations within the community; in particular, the place of each person in relation to all, but also and more generally, the rules, institutions, relations and social practices, as well as the relationship to the world and to nature. Bewitchment is a process through which the sick individual perceives themselves as a victim of another initiated individual © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue XI Version I 7 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A Social Representations of Deafness and Psychological Suffering in Parents of Deaf Children