The Survival of the Disabled : A Psychoanalytic Interrogation of Ableism[1]

손홍석 2026-09-04

The eight survivors at Marronnier Park[2]

“A life of freedom! Out of the institution!” shouted the eight men in wheelchairs at Marronnier Park. It was the 4th of June 2009, the beginning of a long, sixty-two-day outdoor sit-in demanding deinstitutionalization and the establishment of a fair policy for the independent living of disabled people. The eight men, all of them severely physically impaired, were residents of a segregated institution and came to be known as ‘the Marronnier Eight’. They had started their protest against the residential facility with accusations of human rights violations. The monumental resistance at Marronnier Park stirred up a powerful dynamic in Korea’s deinstitutionalization movement, which resulted in the establishment of new policies and substantial changes. After more than twenty years of life in the institution, they threw a stone at the glass wall of an ableist society. They were fighting not only for their own independent lives but also for an inclusive community. They were the survivors.

The illusions of ableism

Ableism is “a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human” (Campbell, 2001). It is a system that installs able-bodiedness as the norm. This criterion makes people view disability as a deficit measured against the standard. It activates the mechanism of representation and assimilation to reduce differences to sameness, thereby othering disability. Beneath this system stand the creeds of the modern Enlightenment, which hold reason, autonomy, and independence to be human ideals. Those ideals urge subjects to achieve complete control of themselves; correspondingly, losing autonomy becomes something to be feared and avoided.

An ableist society regards those who must depend on others as worthless. People who think of themselves as normal see disabled people only from a solipsistic standpoint, projecting onto them their own fantasy of omnipotent control. Through this viewpoint, people who cannot fulfill the universal criteria are seen as objects, as something less than human. Disabled people are objectified: as those to be cared for, pitied, despised, or, at worst, disposed of. They cannot be recognized in their own right; they enter awareness only once they have been represented by, or assimilated into, the ableist society. When projected onto the able-bodied self, the same fantasy gives rise to the compulsion towards a perfect body.

However, this is only a feigned serenity supported by the denial of interdependence. This illusory aspect shows itself in the perplexity, or the faint fear, that arises when we encounter “extraordinary bodies” (Garland-Thomson, 1997), bodies whose strangeness and ambiguity cannot easily be incorporated into the confined ego of able-bodiedness. The disabled body discloses the fundamental vulnerability of all, shattering the fantasy of controlling our bodies perfectly. The overlooked but inevitable fact that we are only temporarily able-bodied[3] reminds us that we were all once dependent on somebody from the beginning and will be so at some point before the end of our lives. Scuro asks a penetrating question of the ableist who could never imagine putting himself or herself in another’s place, or even in the place he or she began from:

The violence permissible with ableist ideologies emerges as a form of thoughtlessness because no one has thought to ask: who is really the narcissist here? Is it the person who has come to identify with a disability or is it the ablebodied person who designates then denigrates the other (but “not me”; “never me”) as disabled? (Scuro, 2018)

The survival of the object and the destruction of fantasy

The illusions of ableism—the fantasy of omnipotent control and the negation of interdependence­—produce a characteristic relational pattern: otherness becomes unthinkable and the disabled body is excluded. This pattern is comparable to what Winnicott called “object-relating” (Winnicott, 1969). He coined the term to describe a relationship in which the infant treats the mother not as a separate entity but as a continuum of the self. Here the m/other is only a “subjective object”, a phenomenon created by the infant’s omnipotent projections—the baby has created the breast (Winnicott, 1969). The mother has been there all along as a facilitating environment, but her subjectivity is not yet recognized: the baby’s needs are met without any awareness that she is the one meeting them. “Object-usage”, by contrast, is the “acceptance of the object’s independent existence” (Winnicott, 1969), and the passage from the one to the other is, for Winnicott, a crucial developmental achievement—the acquisition of a capacity to recognize the m/other as a real object external to the self.

According to Winnicott, a development from “object-relating” to “object-usage” necessarily depends on the “survival of the object” (Winnicott, 1969). The mother has to survive the infant’s destruction of her, which manifests itself as endless demand and ruthless attack. If the mother survives,[4] the infant begins to move away from relating subjectively. The mother is then perceived as “the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right” (Winnicott, 1969). Having developed the capacity to use an object—that is, to relate with an “object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control” (Winnicott, 1969)—the baby can now live in a world of shared reality with others. Recognizing otherness in its own right is a premise of authentic love, of concern for the other, and of a mature subjectivity of the self (Winnicott, 1962).

The survival of the disabled makes it possible to destroy the omnipotent fantasy of ableism. And destroying that fantasy is essential if we are to move from conceiving otherness as a deficit to embracing it as a difference per se. Neither the ableist’s tolerance of disability nor the assimilation of disabled people into ableist society brings about a fundamental change. It is the survival of the disabled that deconstructs the ableist society. The appearance of the Marronnier Eight, and what followed from it, has shown us this simple truth.

The fear of WOMAN and acknowledgement of interdependence

The negation of dependence is the second pillar of ableism, and it accounts for much of society’s cruel prejudice and brutal violence towards disability. As Benjamin puts it, “the self finds it intolerable to bear the vulnerability of being dependent on another subject whom he does not control, indeed who is independent and can demand the same recognition as the Self” (Benjamin, 2018). To disregard one’s dependence on others may lead to fear of the object one depends upon. In a similar vein, Winnicott identified the “fear of WOMAN” as the root of misogyny (Abram, 2007). He insisted on both its palpability and its universality:

This fear of WOMAN is a powerful agent in society structure, and it is responsible for the fact that in very few societies does a woman hold the political reins. It is also responsible for the immense amount of cruelty to women, which can be found in customs that are accepted by almost all civilizations.

The root of this fear of WOMAN is known. It is related to the fact that in the early history of every individual who develops well, and who is sane, and who has been able to find himself, there is a debt to a woman—the woman who was devoted to that individual as an infant, and whose devotion was absolutely essential for that individual’s healthy development. The original dependence is not remembered, and therefore the debt is not acknowledged, except in so far as the fear of WOMAN represents the first stage of this acknowledgement. (Winnicott, 1950)[5]

Winnicott urges us to recognize the universal fact that every individual once depended on someone else at the initial stage of life; recognizing it would lessen the fear inside ourselves. This he takes to be a prerequisite for a society’s progress (Winnicott, 1957). Equating the fear of WOMAN with the fear of dependency, he traces to it the source of the cruelty directed at the object the self once depended upon. I would add that this cruelty can also be turned toward the ones who expose the veiled fact of dependency, the disabled.

Acknowledging our interdependence as a fundamental human condition will therefore pave the way for deconstructing ableism. This is not a difficult truth to be acquired but a plain fact we have forgotten, concealed by fear and defended by the fantasy of complete independence and autonomy. Care from others is indispensable if disabled people are to survive—and it is no less indispensable for everyone else. Care, then, should not be a charity offered in one direction, committing the unwitting violence of endeavouring to normalize the other, but a reciprocally shared way of living in solidarity. This would open a horizon on which we might meet across our boundaries, incommensurable as our differences and our diversity are.

References

Abram, Jan. (2007). The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott’s Use of Words, 2nd Edition. London: Karnac Books.

Benjamin, Jessica. (2018). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Campbell, Fiona K. (2001). Inciting Legal Fictions: Disability’s Date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of the Law. Griffith Law Review, 10(1), 42–62.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. (1997). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Scuro, Jennifer. (2018). Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1950). Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy’. In Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Eds.), Home Is Where We Start From. New York: Norton, 1986.

________ . (1957). The Mother’s Contribution to Society. In Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Eds.), Home Is Where We Start From. New York: Norton, 1986.

________ . (1962). The Development of the Capacity for Concern. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965.

________ . (1969). The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications. In Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.

[1] I use the terms ‘the disabled’ and ‘disabled people’ in order to stress the social discrimination that renders people with impairments disabled, and to treat disability as a sociocultural construction rather than attributing it primarily to impairment.

[2] Marronnier Park, in Seoul, is a landmark of culture and the arts: theatres cluster around it and exhibitions are held there, while musicians and comedians perform on the crowded streets nearby. Since the early 2000s it has also been a hub of the mobility rights movement, and one of the most active organizations in the disability rights movement is based there.

[3] ‘Temporarily able-bodied’ (T.A.B.) refers to the idea that the possibility of disability is not confined to the currently disabled but to everyone. This follows from the fact that most disabilities arise from acquired impairments, and that as people grow old, most will inevitably acquire some degree of disability through illness or declining function.

[4] For Winnicott, survival means not retaliating. He describes two ways in which an object may fail to survive, both of them catastrophic. Either the mother submits to the infant’s attacks, in which case its omnipotent fantasy is maintained; or she impinges upon the infant by imposing her control, in which case its spontaneity is suffocated (Winnicott, 1969).

[5] By capitalizing “WOMAN”, Winnicott distinguishes this fear from an individual’s fear of a particular woman to underline its sociopolitical implications (Winnicott, 1950). As a man of his era, he was trying to account for the rule of dictators and for the group psychology that inclines people towards them. He saw the zeal to be a dictator as a compulsion to cope with the fear of being dominated, by seizing control and demanding total obedience. He further comments that people tend to choose being dominated by a known human being rather than by an unknown woman of fantasy (Winnicott, 1950; 1957).