'Disability studies, inclusive education and psychoanalysis: couch or

'Disability studies, inclusive education

and psychoanalysis: couch or culture?'

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Dan Goodley

Manchester Metropolitan University

[email protected]

Questions …

• How can psychoanalysis contribute to understandings of disablism?

• Does psychoanalysis provide a needed psychological

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• Does psychoanalysis provide a needed psychological input into disability studies and inclusive education?

• To what extent can psychoanalytic theories make sense of ‘abnormality’ and ‘disability’ as necessary constructs in sustaining societal ideals of ‘normality’ and ‘ability’?

• Can psychoanalysis offer disability studies and inclusive education helpful forms of cultural and political critique?

Three projects

• Goodley, D. (2010). Critical disability studies. London: Sage.

• ESRC Does Every Child Matter, Post-Blair? 2008-2010,

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• ESRC Does Every Child Matter, Post-Blair? 2008-2010, with Katherine Ruswick Cole

• PMI2/British Council, ‘Towards a culturally sensitive disability studies: Interconnections of disability studies in and across Malaysia and the UK’, with Rebecca Lawthom and colleagues from UNIMAS, Kuching, Malaysia

Disability studies, the individual and society• Disability theorists articulating

structural models – the ‘social model’

• Disability theorists proposing a cultural and literary studies –

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cultural and literary studies –minority/cultural model

• Poststructuralists theorising the binaries, discourses, complexes which construct disability

• Phenomenologists theorising corporeal matters

• Theories can be situated somewhere along the individual – cultural; psycho-social spectrum

Disability studies: turn to the psychological

• Psychoemotional disablism (Marks, Thomas, Reeve)

• Distributed selves (Booth and Booth, Goodley)

• Corporeal (Hughes, Paterson)• Metaphorical selves (Davis, Murray)• Internalised oppression/false

consciousness (UPIAS, Oliver, 1996;

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psychological • Internalised oppression/false consciousness (UPIAS, Oliver, 1996; Barnes)

• Relational selves (Traustadottir, Thomson)

• Bodies / naïve materialism (Shakespeare)

• Feminisms, queer and postcolonial (Sherry, Meekosha)

Psychoanalysis

• Resource for further arming social, political, cultural, relational and psychoemotional

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relational and psychoemotional analyses of disability and impairment

• Receptive to critique of ideology of ableism

• Provides an analysis of the hegemonic subject

Psychoanalytic concepts, psychoanalytic culture

• Psychoanalytic ideas allow us to make sense of psychic factors in western culture, human and service industries, welfare systems and everyday life

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welfare systems and everyday life

• Because these ideas are everywhere - from Oprah, to NCT, to institutional care (Parker, 1997)

• Psychoanalytic theories describe rather than prescribe the constitution of human beings - the subject - in contemporary societies (Mitchell, 1974)

• Psychoanalytic ideas enrich our understandings of the cultures they have helped to shapre (Burman, 2008: 14)

But …

• Marks (1999) - psychoanalysis can be dangerous

• Might view social model views as manic forms of denial, loss and difficulty

Fortunately, shared positions between DS and Psychoanalysis:

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Psychoanalysis:

• Demand change of psychic and environmental structures rather than just attitudes

• Reject medicalisation in favour of more relational encounters

• Place primacy on the development of the self in relation to others (alterity)

Psychoanalysis can…

• Provide metaphorical and conceptual resources for making sense of the complicated knot of psychic, social, cultural and political factors, which;

• If read politically, can expose subtle, everyday, mundane conditions of subject formation and;

• Give an account of ideology that complements and

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• Give an account of ideology that complements and develops further social theories of disablism but;

• Should always be viewed with healthy skepticism rather than deluded affiliation.

Psychoanalytic discourse ..

• Lacanian psychoanalysis

• Parker (1997), Miller (1998), Rose (1989) … Davis (1995), Michalko (2002), Wilton (2003), Shildrick (2005)

• Ideology

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• Ideology

• Centrality of language

• How societies demand rational, conscious and accountable individuals

• Process of alienation from oneself, others and culture

Therapy …

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• Freud, Jung or Ratchett

…ideology …

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Mitchell, Lacan, Reich and Kristeva

Lacan (1977)PRE MIRROR PHASE (0-6 Months):

BODY IN PEICES

• Hommelette: psychic scrambled egg

• At one with care giver

• Instincts are made in the fragmented parts of the body - eye and the mouth

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• Instincts are made in the fragmented parts of the body - eye and the mouth

• REAL

Lacan (1977)MIRROR PHASE (6-18 Months): BODY AS

IMAGO

• Image of self (I), others (mother), desire of and for the other

• Child becomes captivated by imagos, recognises image - that is me: fantasy of wholeness

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recognises image - that is me: fantasy of wholeness

• Sees a separate image of oneself (ego) -• Misrecognition - because the actual body

never matches up to this frozen image (we are reminded of the real)

• We know we are not bounded body (imago) we are fragmented (real)

• Imago of me (and image of others) is a fantasy: we never have that initial desire of and for

• IMAGINARY

Lacan (1977)SYMBOLIC PHASE (18 Months to 4 years):

Body in culture

• Radical alterity• We learn to speak of our independent

selves and others• Symbolic - words, culture, to speak of I and

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• Symbolic - words, culture, to speak of I and others

• Alienating - millions of ‘I’s (and others), ontological insecurity

• Disorientated by the sheer size of the symbolic (so it is repressed into the unconscious over time)

• Symbolic is empty - signifiers only • ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am

where I do not think’• Symbolic promises everything but gives

us nothing …

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Lacan (1977)SYMBOLIC

• We lose ourselves in language• We are already ‘dead’ in the social• The unconscious is structured by the

symbolic - unconscious is the discourse of the other (will have huge impacts)

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the other (will have huge impacts)• So starts our journey in/out the symbolic • We cling on to signifiers of the symbolic -

hope of finding the original imago of wholeness

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Phallic

• Within the symbolic phase

• Third term of the father: the phallus informs and governs the symbolic: normalises the family relationship

• Aids the separation of child from (m)other

• Shaped in patriarchal ways

• Boys identify with the phallus of the symbolic

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• Boys identify with the phallus of the symbolic

• Girls cannot: women do not exist in the symbolic

• But phallus … is signifier (also empty)

Lac(k)an: fragmented bodies, alientating subjectsDisabled people’s experience can only be understood in relation to

alterity.The creation of the devalued ‘others’ is a necessary precondition for the creation of the able-bodied rational subject who is the all-pervasive agency that sets the term of the dialogue (Ghai, 2006: 79).

The fear of the unwhole body, of the altered body, is kept at bay by the

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The fear of the unwhole body, of the altered body, is kept at bay by the depictions of the whole, systematized body (Davis, 1995: 134).

As a description of patriarchy (Mitchell, 1974) and capitalism (Parker, 1997), we can see the emptiness of neoliberal autonomy (the mirror phase); the relentless nature of self-help consumerism (seeking petit objet a); the dominance of male-stream ideas (phallus) and the precariousness of humanity (fragmented bodied) throughout culture (symbolic).

Lac(k)an: fragmented bodies, alientating subjects

• If the symbolic is empty for non-disabled then it is further emptied and lacking for disabled people, captured in common terms and couplets such as suffering from, afflicted with, persistent vegetative

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suffering from, afflicted with, persistent vegetative state, the mentality of an eight-year-old, useless limb, good and bed leg, mentally unstable, deranged and abnormal (Olkin, 2009: 17)


• Life is lack for Lacanian theory and this can have major impacts on the lives of disabled people. All of us are born with fragmented bodies which then lack the imaginary wholeness of the original imago. The cultural prerogative is to refute those

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imago. The cultural prerogative is to refute those who remind us of our own fragmentation (e.g. disabled bodies): disability be definition implies ‘lacking’ or ‘flaw’ leading to a significantly diminished capability (Ghai, 2002: 51).

Lac(k)an: fragmented bodies, alientating subjects• the other is in all us of but its legacy is that we see the

other outside of ourselves:It is impossible for an ablebodied man to meet the fantasy model of sex, a man

with a disability faces an even more devastating task to live up to the idea; male model (Tepper, 1999: 45).

We all tire of independence and would like to be taken care of, but that wish

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We all tire of independence and would like to be taken care of, but that wish conflicts with our own concept of ourselves as able to cope (Bardach, 2007: 249).

[a disabled client] may be inexperienced at talking about disability, being forthright about her needs, asking for accommodations, negotationing the interpersonal aspects of disability (Olkin, 2009:8).


• The disabled body becomes a site for the cultural projection of that which the ‘non-disabled’ hopes he was but no longer is. The non-disabled points to the disabled as if to say: ‘You are in lack, not I’. This clearly is a way of dealing with the lack

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I’. This clearly is a way of dealing with the lack that every person finds (and at heart knows) themselves caught up in: of not matching the signifier ‘I’ (as appropriated by the Phallus) nor the demands of the big other (the symbolic)


• Disability evokes the real. Disabled people are therefore subjected to curiosity and dismissal, they are cared for and infantilised; ignored and stared at; nurtured and violently expelled. They become the object of the concomitant defences

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become the object of the concomitant defences of the repressed fragmented body (Davis, 1995: 130). T


• With roots in the fragmented pre-mirror real phase (that is mourned) and the autonomous body of the mirror and symbolic (which is idealised), cultural responses may be understood as that which Lacan (1977: 4) indicates as a

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as that which Lacan (1977: 4) indicates as a retrospective condition of the subject who experiences the succession of phantasies that extend from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality (Shildrick, 2007b: 264).


• Disability-as-non-unitary is in all of us. We all have corporeal and ontological anxieties. But, as the body is the reflection of the image of subject, physical disability is not simply a disruption to the semiotic field of the observer (as argued by Davis, 2002), it is also a disruption to the observer’s psychic field (Shildrick, 2007a: 224). As Olkin (2009: 6) puts is:

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2007a: 224). As Olkin (2009: 6) puts is:

• There is a disavowel of disability. It just cannot be psychologically healthy or easy to have a part of oneself that is simultaneously so tangible and undeniable, yet so unacceptable.


• This might explain disavowel in the growing tendency for the labelling of autism: there is to be found the fascinating real of disability not here in the rapidly individualising non-disabled world.

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This is captured well by TepperÕs (1999: 47) account of acquiring impairment and its

impact on masculinity and sexuality:

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Dependency makes a man feel childlike, like a non-man. Complicating the matter is that the majority of rehab nurses who the man in the rehab unit or hospital depends on for his basic care are women.


• The illusory whole of the non-disabled male – a reality of living in the symbolic – is sustained by the localisation of lack in the disabled body

• Richard Reiser (in BBC Television series ‘Nobody’s Normal, episode ‘Education, Education, Edication, 2007) the director of DISEED recalls his childhood as a disabled child sent to special school to become a ‘collection of super-crips’. He recalls treatments that were set up to

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‘collection of super-crips’. He recalls treatments that were set up to instill a lack of recognition of impairment. He was swimming before he was walking and never expected to identify himself as a disabled person. Consequently, he was shocked when he caught a sight of himself in a shop window: ‘I did not recongnise myself in the reflection. I can remember thinking: who is that child with the lop-sided gait? He did

not identify that this was him.


• As we are finding in a current research project (http://www.rihsc.mmu.ac.uk/postblairproject/), caught up in the common experience of losing oneself in the symbolic, the experiences of parents of disabled children are magnified because of being doubly lost in the symbolic. When parents dream of wanting their children to

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symbolic. When parents dream of wanting their children to learn to speak rather than use Makaton an sign symbols; or seek to stop their children from flapping their hands or rocking their heads back and forth to behave more normally (McLaughlin et al, 2008), they are describing their fight with the symbolic which, in the end promises

much but delivers nothing.


• You see, I can’t keep chasing the normal. I mean I’ve done so much to try and make my son normal but I can’t keep that up. I need to accept him in the ways that he is and just enjoy them and him. I must stop pressurising myself. (Rebecca Greenwood, quoted in Goodley, 2007b: 152)

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152)

• Rebecca’s observations expose the illusory nature of the symbolic and remind us that such an illusion of normative wholeness is predicated on the existence of the disabled Other (Ghai, 2002: 53).


Lacanian disability politics? The case of Paul Hunt’s (1996) A Critical Condition

• Paul Hunt’s (1966) A Critical Condition is a passionate piece of writing that clearly accounts

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passionate piece of writing that clearly accounts for the complexity of non-disabled society’s reaction to disabled people. This text has been highly influential in the development of disability studies.


• An impaired and deformed body is a ‘difference’ that hits everyone hard at first. Inevitably it produces an instinctive revulsion, has a disturbing effect � The disabled person’s ‘strangeness’ can manifest and symbolize all differences between human beings � for the able-bodied, normal world we are representatives of many of the things they

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world we are representatives of many of the things they most fear – tragedy, loss, dark and the unknown. Involuntarily , we walk – or more often sit – in the valley of the shadow of death � a deformed and paralysed body attacks everyone’s sense of well-being and invicibility (Hunt, 1996:151 - 156),


• For the disabled person with a fair intelligence or other

gifts, perhaps the greatest temptation is to try to use them

just to escape from his disabledness, to buy himself a

place in the sun, a share in the illusory normal world where all is light and pleasure and happiness � But if we

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where all is light and pleasure and happiness � But if we

deny our special relation to the dark in this way, we shall

have ceased to recognise our most important asset as

disabled people in society – the uncomfortable, subversive

position from which we act as a living reproach to any

scale of values that puts attributes or possessions beyond

the person (Hunt, 1966: 158-159).

Psychoanalytic discourse, disability studies and inclusive education• There is no natural nor disabled body• Demanding disabled people to meet the

demands of the symbolic is an act of cultural violence

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demands of the symbolic is an act of cultural violence

• Asks key question about the epidemic of signification of disability, abnormality, unruly and fragmented bodied and minds (McRuer, 2002)

• Slee and Graham (2008) shines light on the ghostly centre of normalcy that only exists as a consequence of the disavowel of abnormality

• Views disability as the cultural anchor of dismodernism (Davis, 2008)

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