Abstract
In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person’s experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. In this article we introduce what we call the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. We locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment. To ensure that our discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy.
Highlights
According to the influential but widely criticized medical model, disability can be understood in terms of functional limitations of a disabled person’s body caused by a clinically observable pathological condition
We propose a model of disability which we will call the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability, that takes into account the valuable contributions of both the medical and the social model, without being reducible to either of them
The medical model understands the embodiment of the disabled person primarily in terms of physical impairment caused by some underlying pathology
Summary
According to the influential but widely criticized medical model, disability can be understood in terms of functional limitations of a disabled person’s body caused by a clinically observable pathological condition. The medical model understands the embodiment of the disabled person primarily in terms of physical impairment caused by some underlying pathology. We suggest Canguilhem’s idea of health as the experience of being more than normal is an important clue for how to understand the embodiment of disabled people in ecological-enactive terms Such an account will improve on the medical and social models understanding of embodiment in terms of bodily impairment because it will allow us to make a distinction between normal and pathological embodiment. To be normal is for a living body to be able to maintain a state of dynamic stability with its environment This is something the organism needs to continually reestablish by regulating its engagement with the environment based on bodily normativity. This pathological preservation of the local I-can inhibits the person to transcend her way of engaging with the world in favor of better ways, preventing her from tending toward an optimal grip
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