ABSTRACT
Disability studies theory and research have emerged in response to the politicisation of disabled people. Disability studies attends to the social, cultural, material, economic and material conditions of exclusion. Often missing from these analyses is the psychology of disability. This exemption is understandable. Psychology has a troubling and troubled status in disability studies. When disability and psychology cross they tend to do so in terms of rehabilitation, treatment, therapy and cure. While there have been recent attempts to infiltrate psychology with disability studies (Goodley and Lawthom 2005a, 2005b, 2005c) we should remain mindful that psychology has the power to recuperate its disciplinary potency; to individualise the material, political and cultural foci of disability studies. Disabled people remain under-represented on psychology courses (Olkin 2003), and, as indicated in the accounts of Levinson and Parritt (2005) and Stannett (2005), disabled psychologists remain excluded from the profession. Despite these problems, following Goodley (2010, 2016), merging disability studies and psychology might allow us to address a number of issues, including theorising the psychological impact of living with an impairment in a disabling society; exploring the ways in which disabled people psychologically deal with demanding publics; and exposing non-disabled people’s unresolved, unconscious conflicts around their own bodies and personhoods. While addressing these issues might well contribute to the development of disability studies, the idea of developing a psychology of disability raises two significant questions. Does a turn to psychology risk individualising the phenomenon of disability? What psychological orientations already exist that may enhance our relational, social, cultural and political understandings of disability? This chapter will address these questions by making a case against ‘a functionalist psychology of disability’ and developing, as an alternative, an argument for ‘a phenomenological psychology of disability’. I will argue that a psychology of disability, which positions psychology as a functionalist science, that develops as the discipline of the individual, treats individuals in ways that maintain the disablist (and ableist) status quo. In contrast, a critical psychology of disability recasts psychology as phenomenological inquiry, develops psychology as a discipline of and for the community, and seeks to treat the community in ways that challenge disabling conditions of everyday life.
