Repository | Book | Chapter

This chapter explores the potential of drawing on psychoanalytic ideas to analyse disabling culture, to make sense of the influence of culture on subjectivities and to unleash possibilities for individual and collective resistance on the part of non/disabled people. The chapter introduces psychoanalysis as an enlightenment project that has informed cultural understandings of the psyche and subjectivity. To analyse psychoanalytic culture we will explore the approach of Lacanian psychoanalysis with a view to understanding the imaginary and symbolic elements of culture. Our intentions will become more specific as we analyse the precarious cultural foundations of ableist society and consider the ways in which disabled people come to occupy a prominent position of disavowal through which the processes of ableism can seep into everyday subjectivities. Simultaneously, possibilities for resistance will be identified, to challenge the cultural violence of ableism. We will then consider the chapter by the renowned British disability activist Paul Hunt, "A Critical Condition', in the acclaimed book that he edited entitled Stigma (1966), and suggest that while this text has been held up as an exemplary critique of the sociopolitical conditions of disablism, it also bears the marks of a piece of critical psychoanalytic analysis, which identifies lack and possibility. Psychoanalytic culture

DOI: 10.1057/9781137023001_11

Full citation: