An Interview with Valerie Sinason

Jay Crosby: Thank you for speaking today. By way of introduction, I'll say that I'm interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and disability both for personal reasons—I grew up with a father with a chronic physical disability and have a son diagnosed with a rare developmental disability—but also for political reasons, in order to further understand and address the elitism and ableism that continue to permeate and limit our field. I'm wondering if you can speak to how you came to develop your work and how you've negotiated this problem of ableism in psychoanalysis.

Valerie Sinason: There are some key issues that you're raising, one of which is that most of the work done on intellectual disability has been done by people who, like you and me, have someone they love in their family with an intellectual disability, which makes sense. But it was shocking to me when I realized that the second group that cares intellectually, clinically, and theoretically is made up of those that, for whatever reason, have had a complicated minority experience themselves.

At the Tavistock clinic, where for over 20 years I either led or co-led what was first called “the subnormality workshop,” then “the mental handicap workshop,” then “the intellectual disability workshop,” there were the first group, then immigrants that knew what it felt like to not be the wanted color, gender, accent, or class. The only exception to that—was pointed, out for example, by my excellent co-chair for several years in the adult department at the Tavistock, John Stokes—were brilliant upper-class white people who had felt at odds being brilliant, or upper class-, because therapy professions are mainly middle class.

It is easy for a middle class professional to end up thinking that there's middle class, lower middle class, working class, the traumatized, the dispossessed—but can tend to forget that there's upper class and aristocracy. And, in fact, the first time I ever assessed an upper-class patient wi