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).

Keywords:

• disablism
• social theory
• psychoanalysis
• splitting
• ambivalence

Notes

1. Retrieved November 2009 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7906507.stm.