The normality of the abnormal: disability, norms, and normality

The abnormal has always inspired fear; “sameness” reassures. The traumatism for the family that is the arrival of a child affected by a disability hits the parents with considerable violence from the moment the condition is announced. The traumatism of a disability arising within a family affects all the members of that family group, their relations among themselves and with those outside the family, with respect to their history, transgenerational mandates they have received, and the family myths that are theirs. The referral back by the disability to our own vulnerability and finiteness definitively forms part of the human condition, as J. Kristeva recalled in her letter to the President of the Republic. The passage D. W. Winnicott devotes to the ambivalence of thoughts during pregnancy provides additional proof of the fact that this problem of filiation is central in the consequences of disability arising at birth.