Psychoanalysis and Severe Handicap

The Hand in the Cap

Angelo Villa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917790
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The book Psychoanalysis and Severe Handicap: The Hand in the Cap introduces an original look at handicap, a look aiming at capturing the subjectivity, no matter how weak or uncertain it may be, of the ill Other. In this light the work of operators can become an invaluable support to the creation of the self, a crucial help to self-narration, and a valid contribution to making one's way through the entangled intricacies of language. The text falls into six chapters, which elegantly and accurately lead us into the core of the problem tackled. Focusing on the difficulties implied by the recognition of the ill Other and the acceptance of the otherness, the author attacks those cultural policies which set autonomy and integration as absolute objectives to be achieved in the work on handicap. Instead, the author highlights the need of a path aiming at the structuring of the individuality of the disabled and at the molding of their subjectivity, starting from the subject's peculiarities.

CHAPTER ONE

“Good morning, Doctor Villa, meeting you is such a pleasure.” Katia, a woman in her late thirties suffering from Down’s syndrome, walks up to me as I step into the SEC (a socio-educational centre, i.e., a recreation centre for the disabled and handicapped) in order to collect a book which has been left there for me as a present. Katia knows my name, I think, on account of my interviews with the staff in her department, who have probably told her about my visit. I can see her make her way towards me, holding out her hand to shake mine, a broad smile lighting up her face. She is happy: she glows with enthusiasm. She seems to be fully absorbed by the action she is going to perform. She walks steadily towards her goal. I shake her hand and greet her warmly. Then suddenly, like a shadow of that action, the gesture evaporates. I would like to go on and exchange a few words, but Katia’s emotion has gone, not because it has lost its force, rather because simply—no matter how painful that adverb may sound—the interview has come to a close, imploding on itself, like fireworks falling back to the spot on earth from which they were fired. Her emotion is like lightning, which is followed by darkness. It is like a sudden light, so quick that it disappears instantaneously, leaving no trace in memory. It is an explosion, leaving no time to raise your head to the sky. I stand there, petrified. I can see no marks of inhibition on Katia’s face. Her smile has gone, her action has consumed her intention. Her intention has resolved itself into her action. I can do nothing but take my leave of Katia, who affectionately says goodbye, ignoring my embarrassment, which forces me to stand still for a few seconds as I watch her walk away. Perhaps, I wonder, the question of severe handicap starts here, round this dead end, round this lack of communication, digging a chasm between the so-called normal consciousness and the disabled, a gap which no psychology can ever bridge with either good feelings or good will.

Considering human misfortunes and misunderstandings, Spinoza encouraged his fellow beings not to laugh or cry, rather to try and understand. The advice of the wise and humble Jewish philosopher may work as an essential road sign on the way to a reality which seems to be inhabited by a tormenting paradox. On the one hand, handicaps—the devastating disabilities which touch the psyche and the mind and represent the common feature of the users of such facilities as the recreational centre—emerge clearly through their unmerciful self-evidence. Going back to Katia, she is herself. Nobody may misunderstand or overlook a disability which thrusts itself on the perception of the others, the so-called normal people, with no scope for softening the harsh reality. No veil or pretention can cover it. Katia’s looks speak for her, even before she utters a word. On the other hand, the implacable objectivity of being handicapped has often opened up ways to a number of practices and suggestions, as if everybody were trying to escape in their own way from the inextricable knot handicaps evoke. Handicap has ended up looking like an inevitable appointment which everyone would greatly prefer to miss or forget, well knowing that they could never do so, yet hoping to postpone it with some fanciful excuse, while handicaps and the handicapped remain silently in their place, waiting.

It is necessary to be honest, to find the courage to look straight at the colossal black hole which embodies the history of how “normal” human beings have dealt over the centuries with the severely handicapped. If we do so, we can measure the endless cruelty and the abyss of perversion which have failed to receive the attention of historians. The wall of misunderstanding and incomprehension separating “normal” people from the handicapped has often resolved itself into a blind violence, reaching beyond the mere wish for segregation, and handing the disabled over to the arbitrariness of normal people and their voluptuous whims, to their possibility of enjoying the handicapped and their bodies with no feeling of guilt. There is a long list of crimes, ranging from the Tarpeian rock to the Nazi horrors, to the many reports of present-day abuse. Horror has no end. What evil has Katia or people like her committed? None—this is the common answer—and yet … here we are, as the Romans said, in medias res.

The repudiated difference

Let us take a step back to the short interview with Katia. What can we deduce from it? My thoughts are filled with profound frustration. After those few words, I egotistically left. What happens, however, to those who cannot leave, either because they work in the centre or because of family ties with the patients? My frustration derives from the chasm which the unexpected meeting with the woman dug between my expectation waving like a cloth in the wind and her sudden slipping away in an inexplicable manner, one which we can hardly verbalise, even from a phenomenological point of view. The chasm resulted from the gap between the woman’s gesture aspiring to signify intention and the ensuing nothingness, an inexplicable shapeless void.

In such facilities as recreational centres for the handicapped or cooperatives and other institutions dealing with the mentally or psychically handicapped, Katia’s story may well seem to be irrelevant or trivial. Certainly, it does not represent a major problem in patient behaviour. What, however, strikes me in this kind of interaction is the paradox of its apparent triviality. Indeed, Katia’s behaviour does not reveal either uneasiness or suffering. It is not even destined to elicit uneasiness in her interlocutor. If measured against the usual parameters, it does not meet expectations. It is, so to say, a neutral colourless behaviour, which is condemned to the status of missed opportunity by its tendency to acquire some other meaning on a more “normal” level, the non-pathological level of what her action may have meant: a warm, friendly, in a way funny gesture, an expression of her lively personality. Her gesture, however, did not express her personality, or if it did, it only half did so. Freud analysed his patients’ behaviour and what he called their missed acts: broken promises, missed appointments, unfulfilled engagements, incomplete intentions. “Undoubtedly, I said so, I wanted to, I should have done it, but …” The analysers justify themselves. Their “but” is the pivot on which that internal rupture turns, the pivot which reveals them to be strangers to themselves. How can they forget or overlook that which they prize most, which they have so fervently discussed? The missed act enables Freud to go beyond that “but” which provides the subject with a hiding place, a shelter or a thin, almost transparent mask. The wise Viennese master induces the analyser to search for the reasons for that missed act. In the language of the unconscious, in the enigmatic cipher that escapes the control of the conscious will, the missed act becomes the vehicle for an unexpressed or unconscious wish, revealing a new and different truth. If the patient has not performed or completed the act which they had consciously conceived, that is not the outcome of sheer chance or forgetfulness. The analysis of the missed act favours the patient’s awareness of other reasons, till then unknown or removed from the level of consciousness which made it possible. The missed act, once restored to its full meaning in the unconscious, testifies to an incredible and unexpected wealth of meaning, which the patient is encouraged to accept within their psychic life. Through the unique nature of that missed act she can thus gain awareness of feelings and desires which determine her life and choices, much more than she actually thought. Once analysed, the missed act takes on the nature of complete discourse, a revelation of the unconscious, in the same way as dreams and slips of the tongue give voice to the unconscious and reveal it to the conscious.

Is Katia’s act then a “Freudian” act? In other words, is it a missed act? Unfortunately, the answer is undoubtedly negative. In contrast with the missed act, Katia’s behaviour may feature as a half-act, an act which is marked by an impossibility of being fully performed, completed, an act which does not belong to the level of the unconscious. Sometime later, a woman working in the same centre told me about an interview with a patient suffering from a similar disability. They were at the seaside, at the time in summer the disabled and the staff spend together. A boy went up to her and told her he had something to say in private. The woman found a quiet place where they could speak. At this point, while they were facing each other and the boy’s wish could easily be fulfilled, he suddenly came to a halt and became silent. The exchange plunged into the void, no matter how hard the woman tried to do her best. There was no way to change the outcome of the interview. The worker gave up her efforts as soon she realised that the problem did not have a psychological root. The boy seemed not to know what he wanted to say. Linguists would say that the message was actually subsumed or absorbed by the code.

In both cases—Katia’s and the boy’s—it was subjectivity that revealed its impasse, at the very moment when it was about to emerge. The effect on normal beings’ perception is upsetting. The distance between them and the disabled manifests itself in an inexorable and inhumanly atrocious way, right when it might otherwise dwindle and disappear. Is it, then, in the opaque ray of a deserted utterance, of a failed opportunity for communication, that the sense of fatigue, and ultimately the attitude of rejection that the “normal” human being develops towards the disabled, is nurtured? Is it the materialisation of this rupture that pushes the former to get away from the latter? The “normal” say to themselves: “How can I spend time with a person I cannot properly communicate with? A dialogue with the handicapped becomes sterile and their presence such a burden. How can I bear this truncated word, swallowed by a vortex of silence which effaces both meaning and explanation?”

It is clear that this sense of frustration underlies the attitude of rejection towards the handicapped, both when it is direct and explicit and when it is indirect and masked. The habit of dealing with the disabled in as great a hurry as possible discloses this attitude of refusal, originating in a radical disbelief in their value and potentialities. If they do not understand, if we do not understand each other, the temptation to behave as if they did not exist is irresistible. It also happens that hostility towards the disabled manifests itself in a total absence of contact with them. We often read in newspapers about the adoption of striking attitudes of “preventive” rejection of the handicapped. Hotel-keepers cancel a booking as soon as they hear that it is for a group of disabled people. Parents do their best to avoid the presence of a severely handicapped pupil in their children’s class. In most cases, the “normal” human being does not even have a clear idea who the other actually is. They have never even seen her face, they have never tried to greet him. Here the refusal is not the outcome of a possible meeting, as happened to Katia or the boy. In fact, the opposite happens. The rejection of the disabled precedes the actual meeting, or, better, it makes such a meeting impossible for the present and the future. As is easily understood, the whole question is inhabited by a dark complexity, which is never fully made transparent. The neurotic nature of language, discussed by the writer Giuseppe Pontiggia, is a symptom of the difficulties that the “normal” experiences. Over the last few years, definitions of handicaps and disabilities have multiplied themselves, either generating improbable neologisms or exploring language in search of an impossible formula which may combine the designation of a difference with its negation. The ensuing feeling of confusion has consequently increased. Words, the sea of words and of more or less politically correct linguistic inventions, go their way. Handicap is nailed somewhere else, like an obstinate, unemotional warrior observing the corpse of his enemy as it is washed to his feet by the flow of the river.

The task that words are required to perform is that they may open and close, dilate and bend like rubber to the needs of reality, which literally looks incomprehensible and unbearable to the “normal” human being, with no possibility of articulation of those feelings, of the mystery surfacing in the normal being’s conscience when a severely handicapped person looms on the horizon. The wish to quickly solve the problem, moving briskly from one extreme to the other, as easily as one may turn the pages of a dull book, is an unmistakable symptom of the feeling of embarrassment raised by disabilities.

The tactics are, after all, foreseeable. It is a question of covering the abyss the “normal” perceives when meeting a disabled person, which will induce such behaviours as the conscience will later disapprove. If the behaviour is, as I said, foreseeable, that is because it largely works like a mirror. If difference, if otherness raises difficulties, it starts uncontrollable or unavowable echoes in the “normal” person. Better to do away with difference, though only on an ultimately imaginary level, even though in so doing, we run the risk of reducing the peculiarity of the disabled. How shall we name that attitude? Shall we name it refusal to refuse? Let us overlook the pun: in that attitude we can perhaps detect the inexhaustible source of an infinite, though doubtful, generosity, an expression of an ill-contained wish to attain a kind of squaring of the circle, a satisfactory solution, both in terms of content and form, a conceptual pirouetting which forces thought to take an obligatory path, in which the recourse to force paradoxically veils the shadow which faithfully accompanies it: violence. Against all labels, all rhetorical formulae or catchy slogans, the range of stereotyped common sense is called upon to contain and control a “something” which remains nameless, the pale trace of a memory which the “normal” conscience must remove and reject in order to finally discover and recognise its own nature, thus consoling and reconciling itself to its own idealised image.

“The other is like me”: thus the inscription over the entrance door to a cooperative for the disabled. The sentence strikes the reader for its obvious contradictoriness. It synthesises the spirit of the movement creating it in total indifference to the determinacy of an elementary logic. If the other is like me, what “other” are they? They are no longer other than me. The problem is solved. Actually, it should never have been posed. Why pose it only to deny its existence? It is a dog biting its own tail. Citing difference only to reduce it to its opposite, to a simile laden with egotism, is to suck the other into our self-love, thus eliminating his difference and swallowing him into the apparently virtuous circle of the feeling which the disabled once seemed to endanger. The other is deprived of his otherness almost by decree. He is made identical with … with whom? With me. With the person who establishes himself as an absolute parameter for any comparison. We are well beyond the famous biblical precept which Freud (1930) did his best to question: “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev., 19, 18). The verb presupposes or, better, alludes to a tension. It is an invitation, or perhaps an imperative (Balmary, 1986). It certainly reveals a gap between what a subject feels, or may feel, and what they should do. Love is called upon to replace other affections which dominate our experience. As a matter of fact, the biblical motto tacitly implies them. It does not ignore, and does not even aim at ignoring, their existence. Moreover, there is the problem of correctly interpreting the phrase “neighbour”: who may it refer to? Who is my neighbour? The people living next door to us? Foreigners? The unconscious? “The other is like me” goes in a different direction. It does not point anywhere; rather, it decrees. It does not elicit anything: it establishes. As brief as it may sound, that sentence is more of a motto, summing up an ideology which actually aims at orienting an approach, at guiding a meeting without wondering about a force which may push in a different direction. The other seems to be accepted insofar as they are turned into duplications of the self, non-existent doubles coined to mirror the image of their creators. They are their creators’ likeness, they are nothing but their creators. Is this the condition on which the other, no longer unique in his difference, can be loved?

Alessandro’s mother

The catchphrase of the cooperative seems to turn into a universal formula, which ignores the variety of contexts and individual peculiarities. One is replaced by two: the subject is duplicated, the “normal” human being is doubled through an abstract operation which does not really need any anchoring experience, so strongly does it aim at covering, like a huge snowfall, the disclosing of differences and the reasons for anxieties, so appallingly unanswered does it leave the questions which handicaps tacitly raise in the “normal” consciousness. It is simply a sentence against another sentence, getting away from the safe harbours of moralist certainties and facing us with the complex reality which surrounds handicaps. A different sentence uttered by the mother of a severely handicapped boy may provide us with a rough parameter against which it is possible to work out an answer to the question. The picture changes. The sentence consists in the chain of words a woman utters during an interview. Her son Alessandro suffers from spastic quadriparesis: he sits in a wheelchair because he cannot walk, his language is minimal and difficult to understand. His intellectual development is strongly impaired. He goes to primary school, where a specialised teacher tutors him.

His mother tells me what happened to her the day before, when she fetched Alessandro after lessons. “As soon as he saw me, he ran towards me”, she says. During the interview she does not even realise the untruthfulness of her utterance. She goes on in her talk, while that short sentence fixes itself in my mind like an undeletable trace. Her talk is lucid, coherent, well organised. Only that sentence opens up a window on something beyond, which quietly objects to its coherence. The tone is calm, as if it were trying to accommodate a truth which is hard to accept and which is faced with laudable dignity and uncommon courage. The woman takes up the load of her son’s handicap. Her husband owns a small company. They have other children and they do not have any financial difficulties. Yet, Alessandro has been handed over to her, as if he were her task, totally and solely her task, or perhaps—and how could we distinguish between the two alternatives?—she appropriated this task, which she rarely resents. The dedicated love she feels for Alessandro is self-evident. She seems to be trying to compensate for all that he will never be or will never be able to do, either in the near or in the distant future. Unfortunately, Alessandro does not run and he will never be able to do so.

His mother’s sentence breaks through a discourse which seems to pay its tribute to the crushing objectivity of the principle of reality. It is a break, a subtle, deep cut in that discourse, the symptom of a tension which never relents, which never surrenders, an almost insignificant though preposterous detail which does not accept an unjust and unacceptable destiny.

Alessandro’s mother does not refuse her son’s handicap. Nor does she refuse to reject it: she simply declines the role. Her position probably says nothing at all, or if it does, it says only very little about the reasons why the “normal” may reveal a certain awkwardness in the presence of the handicapped. Her position, however, sheds light on the impossible point which “normal” consciousness seems to aim at well beyond the opaque surface of disabilities: the wound which handicaps maintain wide open, and the intentions that wound tries to overcome. Psychology does not always capture the nature of handicaps to help the suffering subject deal with it. Handicaps are a tragedy, a tragedy of wish, which Alessandro’s mother, or better still, her wish, contrasts, even though she is well aware of the uselessness of her effort. The wish remains. Literally, it does not accept diminishing in any way. The slogan of the cooperative tried to reproduce an arbitrary image of the other, which doubled the image of the “normal” human being, thus revealing a vague and therefore safe wish. Alessandro’s mother’s sentence is of a different nature. It subtly, though deeply, alters the perception of reality. It does not ignore the existence of the obvious violent difference between Alessandro’s condition and that of the “normal” human being. Nevertheless, it forces this difference in the wrong direction, thus involuntarily running the risk of leaving the tracks of adequacy for the prison of evidence. The risk consists in getting lost, in abandoning the path of shared experience. The desire for total equality implies this risk. Alessandro’s mother, or rather her desire, accepts to run the risk. Her words betray an expression which seems closer to hallucination than to falsehood.

The cooperative’s slogan reveals a forced self-imposed construction, emanating from a collective superego. It tends to promote the best of a total image, ready to be handed over to no matter whom. Alessandro’s mother’s utterance is the crack through which the dimension of an invisible something creeps. She says: “I have seen.” However, that seeing does not belong to the dimension of an experiencing vision, one that recognises reality. Her seeing points to the uncanny force of a look: nothing more, nothing less, the most radical mark of the presence of a subject, the most obstinate act of a human being who does not accept to be confined to a body. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan rightly emphas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Italian Edition
• Preface to the English Translation
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• References
• Index