Overview

This is a decisive new approach to our understanding of 'intellectual disability' as a social and linguistic category. This book breaks both with essentialist approaches, which ground the understanding of intellectual disability in the putative physical and intellectual materiality of individuals, and with social constructionist approaches, which are caught in an inescapable paradox of being unable to grasp their nebulous target. By conducting an 'archaeological' discourse analysis this study demonstrates how intellectual disability is produced, not as a conceptual entity, but as a discursive field. Tracing its four principal conceptual parameters - functioning, organic pathology, intelligence and development - the book outlines the economy of relations between the diverse objects, concepts and practices that constitute intellectual disability today. In addition, the work demonstrates that the current discourse on intellectual disability emerged from a decisive conceptual rupture at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Eschewing claims of a long-established 'understanding' of the essential nature and basic elements of idiocy, Modernity and the Appearance of idiocy shows that prior to the early 1900s there was a variety of conceptual formations, and none which closely matched a truly developmental understanding of idiocy.

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Tellingly, Simpson concludes with a cautiously optimistic 'refusal' of the current way of doing things for people with intellectual disability as the only way of doing things, wondering if his archaeological investigations can, in some minimal sense, serve as a demonstration that what is, has not always been and might in the future cease to be. (Professor Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences) His thought-provoking work scrutinizes the competing agendas of psychiatrists and lay society, and of education and medical psychology. This is a work which will stimulate debate across academic disciplines where there is already deep fascination surrounding mental health and how society felt it should respond to it over a two-hundred year period. (Dr. Iain C. Hutchinson, University of Stirling)

Author Information

Dr. Murray K. Simpson is a Reader in the School of Education, Social Work, and Community Education at the University of Dundee. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Dundee.

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