The Symbolic Mind: A Disability Studies Polemic

I was in a Chinese restaurant in New York City last week. We were a disability-centric group: one of us had CP, another was a wheel chair user, one had HIV, one was visually impaired with a guide dog. One was a scholar of disability studies, another was a medical doctor. We sat at a table with a Lazy Susan, the garlic broccoli and the General Tso’s chicken spinning around. As conversation unfolded it became clear that one of us was blaming doctors for all the associated problems of people with disabilities. I knew “our doctor” “at table” as an ally, one who understands implicitly all the vagaries and dilemmas of disability discrimination. I could see that the doctor was willing to absorb some contempt but I felt, and not for the first time, a deep weariness with the cant of disability studies. I heard the voice of Bill Clinton in my head saying: “That dog won’t hunt.” Yes, there is a long history of medical insensitivity–and worse, a history of organized hypo-institutionalized discrimination against PWDs. Yes, contemporary medicine is still often divorced from sufficient awareness of how disability functions as a social construction, one that descends directly from a rather Victorian medical model of disability. And yet there are doctors who possess tremendous capacities of consciousness. There are many more than the brittle “blame it on the doctors” reflex of disability studies may admit.

When human beings confuse the negative facts of history with the symbol making power of of the psyche they invariably abandon insight. All of us prefer the think and pungent condensations of symbolism to the harder work of human psychology.

I know for a fact that the doctor in question was a bit wounded by hearing the “blame it all on doctors” rhetoric of the disability studies scholar. “Who the hell wants to be a doctor anymore?” she asked me later. “No one likes doctors. All we do is take abuse.”

It is wrong to pathologize the doctors just as it is wrong to pathologize those who seek treatment though perhaps they may not be curable–indeed may not with to be cured.    

We all possess some magical incalculability. Let demons prove themselves so before assuming anything. A good practice.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto