Disability, Family Coping, and Family Resilience in Doris Lessing s The Fifth Child

The phenomenon of disability, the disabled individual and, accordingly, disability studies have recently been of interest to many disciplines. In the context of disability studies, our scrutiny aims to address the family with a disabled child and the fictional disabled character Ben together with his environment. Disability studies enable the scrutiny of family members with disabled children, who are affected by the phenomenon of disability at least as much as disabled individuals, from many psychological, sociological, economic, individual and social aspects. One of the pillars of disability studies with an interdisciplinary structure is in the field of literature so literary works are used to understand and perceive disabled individuals. Along with the emergence and development of disability studies, the psychosocial scrutiny of families with disabled children and the analysis of Doris Lessing’s novel, The Fifth Child at this level are among the focal points of our study. In this respect, Lessing, who includes disabled characters in the novel we are dealing with in our study, focuses on the communication and interaction of disabled individuals with their environment, who are trying to hold on in society. This study consists of three parts except Introduction, Method, Findings and Conclusion. In the first part, the concepts of disability and family, in the second part, coping in the family with a disabled child and in the third part, the resilient individual in such a family are scrutinised.