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A version of this piece appeared as the preface to the English-language translation of Angelo Villa's The Hand in the Cap: Psychoanalysis and Severe Handicap (2013). It is published here with the permission of the publisher.
There is an uncanny story of misunderstanding and misappropriation in the etymological history of the term “handicap.” Lore has it that “handicap” comes from the idea of having your cap in your hand, that is, being a beggar, which is one reason the term has been maligned in the contemporary world of cultural sensitivity and political correctness. However, the link between handicap and mendicancy is not in fact the origin of the word, which actually comes from a 17th-century (perhaps earlier) game called hand in the cap, or hand-i-cap for short, where two players play at agreeing or disagreeing to a barter set up by a third player. One's willingness to assent to a particular deal when others may not (the spoils of both easily recognizable advantages or disadvantages go to the umpire) is in essence what is rewarded in this game of chance and interpersonal exchange. Because part of the game involved establishing the value of a particular barter in order to determine how to equalize the playing field, the word hand-i-cap became a word used more generally in sport for penalties applied in order to square the odds. This was true, for example, in horse races, where added weight to the superior horse was called a handicap. It is in this regard that handicap was transmuted into a name for those who suffered a range of human disabilities, though it seems important to note a change from an imposed disability on the dominant subject to an inborn or acquired one that defines the person who is deficient.
Inherent in the etymology of the word is an ethics that necessitates a third-party judgment in the determination of odds, a tense and terse game of human interchange, which seems to me particularly apt with respect to the question of the handicapped. But what t