Social psychoanalytic disability studies

Abstract

This paper explores connections and tensions between psychoanalysis and disability studies. The first part of the paper considers contemporaneous engagements with the psyche by a number of disability studies writers. These scholars have remained accountable to a politicised disability studies but have pushed for critical encounters with the psychoemotional, phenomenological, metaphorical and relational aspects of disablism. Against this critical backdrop, this paper makes a case for a social psychoanalytic disability studies. Whilst vigilant to the pathologising and individualising tendencies of some forms of psychoanalytic theory, the paper explores a social psychoanalytic encounter with disablism in terms of splitting the subject as a key process implicated in the exclusion of disabled people. It is concluded that social psychoanalytic disability studies can play a huge role in understanding and challenging disablism; which Thomas defines as 'a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well being' (2007, 73; emphasis added).

‘Diff‐ability’ not ‘disability’: right‐brained thinkers in a left‐brained education system

“…He states that this can be viewed differently – that the psyche can be reconsidered as a complex tight knot of the person and the social world, the self and other people, the individual and society. Goodley (2011, p. 4) states:…”

“…This individual deficit model is consistent with the medical model of disability and allows for the labels that convey negative connotations to remain, such as need, disorder, disability and special. Goodley (2011, p. 3), when theorising about the psyche in disability studies, suggests that it can be ‘understood as a cultural artefact of contempory society that individualises social problems', the idea being that medical, tradition, individual and bio‐psychological models of disability locate the problems in the heads and bodies (the psyche) of the disabled person. He suggests that the commonly held view is that the disabling society is not the problem – the problem is the disabled psyche.…”

“…Reeve (2008, p. 1) describes this tension as the ‘barriers in here’ alongside ‘barriers out there’. Additionally, this view is applied by Goodley (2011, p. 8) to therapy as he asserts that it too is ‘conservative as it aims to fix the person but leaves the environment unchanged’.…”

Feeling disability: theories of affect and critical disability studies

“…Also, we know that a precarious sense of self becomes heightened in times of austerity (Flynn 2017). Goodley's (2011Goodley's ( , 2016 interest in deploying psychoanalysis was less with disabled people and more with non-disabled people. In particular, he played around with the idea of the psychopathology of the normals, which considers the ways in which the precarious nature of living with being non-disabled (or able-bodied or able-minded) inevitably plunges individuals into emotional turmoil (Goodley 2014).…”

“…(Marks 1999a;21) Such feelings of emotional and ontological invalidation risk self-harm and self-hatred (Marks 1999b, 615, also see Hughes 2009). Goodley too has deployed social psychoanalytic concepts to explain further the generation of fear, disgust but also attraction in relation to disability displayed by non-disabled culture (Goodley 2011(Goodley , 2014(Goodley , 2016. This analysis was indebted to the writings of Marks (1999aMarks ( , 1999bMarks ( , 2002 and Watermeyer (2013) who as therapists trained in the psychoanalytic tradition are far more skilled in deploying this theoretical language.…”