In a highly accessible prose style, Grace Spence Green describes to us all her entry to the world of being disabled. Green’s impairment through accident in her early twenties transforms her into being a wheelchair-user. In this way she finds herself suddenly immersed in a world not made with her in mind. She has ‘specific places I am allowed to enter’ and many she is not. She is infantilised and feels a pressure to soothe the anxiety her condition aroused in others. She loses friends, though is frank about the resources her enduring family and friends represent. Treated like an object she finds herself asking ‘who would I be to all these people now’.
Grace also forms many rich new bonds. Questioning the pressure to be ‘like everyone else again’, the unattainable and oppressive ideal that disabled people often feel expected to strive for, she finds her way to a community of disabled people in all walks of life. This she will need, as her life is full of barriers. Resuming her medical training as a wheelchair-user means she is constantly in places never designed with her in mind, in spaces where lack of representation of disabled people makes her rarity. Yet her work with patients is enriched by the experience of life from the other side.
Despite some recent fruitful thinking, psychoanalysis has not had a great history in regard to disability, often pathologising or ignoring the experience of disabled people, seeing the problem in the person rather than a person in a social and interpersonal context. Green tells us of this, of the marginalising, excluding, voyeuristic, objectifying world into which she is thrust and the daily low expectations she has to battle, the invisibility, the social losses. And of how she is able – in part through her work with a disabled psychotherapist – to ‘stop internalising’ the wounding reactions to which she is exposed.
Green’s book is not a psychoanalytic one, but anyone practicing psychoanalytically could learn from it.
To Exist as I Am, Grace Spence Green, 2025, Wellcome Collection.