Conceptualising psycho-emotional aspects of disablist discrimination and impairment : towards a psychoanalytically informed disability studies

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Since the 1970s, the international disability movement has galvanised around the socialmodel of disability, as an adversarial response to traditional, individualising medicalaccounts of disablement. The model foregrounds disablist ideology, identifying systematicexclusion and discrimination as central mediators of disabled life. Latterly, feminist authorswithin disability studies have problematised the arid materialist orientation of the socialmodel, for its eschewing of personal and psychological aspects of disability, and poortheorising of embodiment. Social model orthodoxy construes the psychological asepiphenomenal, diversionary, and potentially misappropriated in the buttressing ofpathologising accounts of disablement. A legacy of traditional psychoanalytic theorising ondisability implies causal links between bodily difference and psychopathology, eliding acritical interrogation of oppression in mediating the severely marginal social and economicdestiny of the disabled minority. The new critical psychoanalytic approach to disabilityinterprets broad social responses to disablement as the enactment of defences engaged inreaction to the universal unconscious existential conflicts evoked by disability images. Thepresent work seeks to elaborate the integration of psychoanalysis into disability studies,towards development of a politically situated psychology of disability oppression, whichcreates theoretical links connecting ideology with the nature of individual subjectivity.Conceptual ideas to begin describing the psycho-emotional aspects of disablist oppression andimpairment were developed via an integration of clinical data with a renewed,psychoanalytically informed critical synthesis of disability-related research from a range ofdisciplines. Clinical data was gathered via psychoanalytically oriented group psychotherapywith severely physically impaired university students. Full transcriptions and in-depth fieldnoteswere utilised as a record of data, which was then analysed via interpretive,psychoanalytic and interpretive auto-ethnographic methods. Follow-up interviews wereheld to assess the resonance and utility of new concepts. A range of theoretical contributionswas combined in illuminating the modernist cultural and political underpinnings of oppressiveresponses to the impaired body, and integrated with accounts of the psychological andrelational predicaments of disablism gleaned from the clinical record. Topics drawn fromliterature, critically evaluated, developed and re-synthesised included narcissistic culture, thefamily, medicalisation, social mirroring, internalised oppression, liminality, andrepresentations of disability in charity, art and modern bioethics. The nature ofcountertransference dynamics in therapeutic work with disabled people was considered. Keyconcepts from the clinical data were developed and progressively reformulated; these includedthe distortion of boundaries, the discourse of loss, control, independence, identity, complicity,trauma, and the imperative to silencing the subjective experience of disabled life.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University