The monster at the door: disability, colonial states of mind, and the depressive position

Abstract Across markers of difference (race, gender, ethnicity), psychic and material colonization enforces dominant cultural prescripts. The stranger dwells in shadow, caught between abject projections and melancholic demands to strive for all that they are not. One heavily cathected identity marker is disability, which in phantasy supports a reassuringly immutable boundary between the “damaged” and the “whole”. Projective identification positions the disability community as custodians of disavowed, yet universal human realities such as bodily frailty, interdependency and vulnerability. But here the other lies dormant within the colonist, as disability awaits us all, confounding authoritarian ideals and inviting depressive position functioning based on the recognition of human commonality.