On a recent trip to Ireland to trace the roots of my husband’s ancestry, we found ourselves winding through lush, green landscapes transversed with meticulously built stone walls. The meaning of these walls reverberates within me—not the walls that divide property, wrangle sheep, and contain cattle, but the tragically named “famine walls,” built by destitute people and often serving no function.
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For context, the Irish potato famine lasted from 1845 to 1852 after a mold infected the potato crop and created devastating hunger, causing one million people to die and another one to two million to emigrate. Following the 1800 Act of Union, Ireland was supposed to have been an equal member of the United Kingdom at the time of the famine. However, the British considered the Irish to have brought this fate upon themselves, and as such, it was only “right” to make them labor for their food, whether or not the often pointless work itself cost them their lives. These walls were ultimately built under a famine relief project because the idea of giving food out freely was seen as a “moral hazard — it risked the possibility of thousands of Irish people becoming overly reliant on the state for relief” (Crowley, 2020).
This is a stunning mirror of how we think about hardship, disability, and illness in the United States. The trope of the disability con artist feigning hardship in order to burden the taxpayer, has been embedded in our collective psyche since the Civil War (Dorfman, 2019). In the U.K, despite .07% of disability claims being investigated for fraud and 87% of those overturned, the image of the scrounger and fraudster persists (Pring, 2019). In the U.S., the rates of fraud are just as small — less than one percent (ssa.gov). Despite these tiny percentages, suspicion and resentment, perhaps even envy of “special” privileges for disabled people persists and undermines their legitimate rights to equity.
The fact that disability is fluid has led to the perceptual connection between disability and fakery (Dorfman, 2019). For example, sometimes people in wheelchairs can walk short distances, and sometimes those with chronic pain have good days. For those who are autistic, functioning is variable, and in the right sensory environment, they might appear neurotypical. This leads others to suspect that those who make use of their civil rights are faking their disabilities and abusing the law.
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If anything, what I have witnessed in my disabled clients is their reluctance to utilize any “privileges” bestowed upon them for fear of taking advantage or being looked at with suspicion. One client with chronic pain suffers greatly from standing for long periods. When asked if anyone needs to board the airplane early, she will often suffer in silence rather than bear the judgment of fellow passengers who question her condition.
Another client, still unable to find employment after years of rejection, has been raised not to accept government help, even when her support needs as an autistic individual make it far more challenging for her to find sustainable work. Disabled people who use their parking permits are notoriously harassed if they don’t look “disabled enough,” and many decide to forego the benefit. Often I hear clients comparing themselves to others who are more deserving of aid, and relinquishing their much-needed supports for fear that resources are too scarce.
Psychoanalysis has given us a framework to understand the complex emotions that get stirred up in non-disabled people by those with disabilities. Dr. Dan Goodley offers a social psychoanalytic perspective along with critical disability studies that examines the “collective non-disabled psyche.” He focuses on “the ways in which non-disabled people and disablist culture symbolize, characterize, construct, gaze at, project, split off, react, repress and direct images of impairment and disability in ways that subjugate and, at times, terrorize disabled people whilst upholding the precarious autonomy of non-disabled people.”
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Goodley uses the concept of “splitting,” a primitive ego defense mechanism first introduced by Melanie Klein in 1946 as a way to understand the stigmatization of certain social groups. Splitting originates in the earliest relationship of the baby to its caregiver. Babies divide their world into good and bad in order to protect the fragile self. The mother/caregiver is split between good (the present mother who meets the baby’s nurturance needs) and bad (the absent mother who cannot always be there and represents the pain of our separateness). Splitting allows the baby self to cope with the overwhelming anxiety and pain associated with the loss of the nurturing mother and the reality of developing a separate self. The “bad” mother is split off and becomes other, while the “good” mother is internalized and becomes part of the self.
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There is also a split in our individual psyche between “me” and “not me.” The baby introjects, or takes in aspects of the other that are desirable, and projects onto others the feelings or traits it wants to disown. Thus, as we develop, our internal conflict around vulnerability gets played out by either owning our desire for nurturance and dependency, or projecting onto others our rejection of such as weak, needy, and contemptuous. The disabled person becomes a proxy for this fundamental need we both covet and denounce. According to Oliver (2007), “It is the fear and denial of our own vulnerability that causes us to hate and exploit the vulnerability of others.”
As we celebrate Disability Pride Month, I hope we can explore the meaningless walls that have been constructed between the psyches of the disabled and non-disabled in our culture. From discrimination, invalidation, and paternalism to hate crimes, we need to wrestle with our contempt toward our dependency needs in order to dismantle the fear and guilt that divide us.
References
Crowley, J. (2020). How a “truly modern famine” devastated Ireland – and changed the world forever. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. https://www.rte.ie/history/the-great-irish-famine/2020/0629/1150367-the…
Dorfman, D. (2019). Fear of the Disability Con: Perceptions of Fraud and Special Rights Discourse. Law & Society Review, 53(4), 1051–1091. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45284585
Pring, John. “‘Horrific’ stats show how most disability benefit fraud allegations are false.” Disability News Service, 2019. https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/horrific-stats-show-how-most-disa…
https://www.ssa.gov/disabilityfacts/facts.html
Goodley, D. (2011). Social psychoanalytic disability studies, Disability & Society: 6, 715-728, DOI: 10. 1080/09687599.2011.602863
Source link : https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/psychology-meets-neurodiversity/202407/the-trope-of-the-disabled-con-artist?amp
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Publish date : 2024-07-16 22:58:23
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