Who Gets to Feel Ok? Disability, Healthy Narcissism and the Emotional Economy of Modernity

Psychoanalysis sees disabled people as harbingers of the return of repressed existential anxieties to do with bodily frailty and mortality, underpinning their oppression. Previously, psychoanalysis associated disability with narcissistic psychopathology, denying environmental factors implicated in inequality. Late modernity evidences a ‘culture of narcissism’, involving projection and rampant materialism, which is threatened by disability. But narcissism also appears as a healthy, needed resource. This paper argues that access to ‘narcissistic supplies’ is systemically denied in the lives of disabled people, who must confront existential anxieties which the narcissistic modern world avoids. Cultural, political and economic circumstances regulate who gets to ‘feel OK’, leaving disabled people to perform excessive emotional labour but also provoking insights into the human condition among this group.