Conceptualising the psycho‐emotional aspects of disability and impairment: the distortion of personal and psychic boundaries

Abstract

Recent feminist critics of the social model of disability have pointed towards a danger that disability studies may give relatively little attention to personal and emotional aspects of disablist oppression and impairment. We argue for consideration of the centrality of the distortion of personal and psychic boundaries as a key aspect of oppressive relational dynamics surrounding disability. Within the observer the disturbing psychic evocations of disability, and related defences, are connected to the maintenance of dynamics of unreal, collusory and alienating modes of relating, which may deprive disabled people of the recognition of subjective experience and personhood. Skewed socialisation of disabled people, involving inter alia the protection of the emotional lives of others, as well as the reality of inaccessible material resources, contributes to the internalisation of disablism and the ideological recruitment of disabled people as complicit in their marginalisation.