Disability and countertransference in group psychotherapy: connecting social oppression with the clinical frame

Psychoanalysis has paid limited attention to disability, and at times the approach has lacked political awareness. Over recent decades the international disability rights movement has argued that disabled people constitute an oppressed, systemically disadvantaged minority. Lately, a critical psychoanalytic view has connected disablist discrimination to universal unconscious conflicts evoked by impairment. Corresponding evocations emerge in the therapeutic frame, producing countertransference responses to the impaired body. Drawing on psychoanalytically oriented group psychotherapy with severely physically impaired adults, countertransference phenomena were studied in developing discussion on disability-related clinical work. The complex, uncertain role of psychoanalytic practice in combating oppression was also examined. Key issues include challenges to the traditional frame, the crossing of psychic boundaries, anxieties relating to not knowing, and the role of unconscious factors in marginalizing disabled experience.