Omsorg och Kontroll En handikapphistorisk studie 1750- 1930

Care and Control
This was further divided into specific categories or fields – deafness,
blindness, idiocy and delusion – each specializing in solving its own particular
issues. I consider these efforts to be care mixed with power via the
exercise of discipline, as a method to train and educate children, teenagers
and adults alike. The goal was to turn them into good citizens who could
provide for themselves with the skills they acquired in special schools.
Two somewhat different ways of thinking – thought styles or thought
collectives – can be said to have characterized perceptions of mankind and
society. These can simply be described as ”popular” and ”scientific”. From
my source material I have drawn the conclusion that a distinction between
the two is indeed justified, and that there is a clear differentiation between
them insofar as e.g. approaches to knowledge and apprehension of mankind
and the world are concerned.
In Chapter Two, I discuss how popular perceptions of children who failed
to develop as expected and demanded special care were formed with
the help of ”changeling tales”: the belief that supernatural beings could intervene
in the lives of ordinary people and threaten the natural order of
things. This folklore was based in ancient tradition and practical and cultural
experience and was for the most part retrospective. Difficulties in understanding
and interpreting the reason that one´s newborn was physically
different could be more easily dealt with in this manner. Trolls or wights
had exchanged their grotesque, misshapen infants for the pretty, well-formed
offspring of human beings.
Folktales and perceptions of disability tell us something about the norms
reigning in a society and the conflict between the popular and the scientific.
Like folklorist Jochum Stattin, I have chosen to interpret these tales as ”symbolic
representations of the norms, values and ideas of a society”. Their content
can also be apprehended as a projection of the mother´s feelings of guilt,
a defense mechanism and subconscious arena for working out her reactions.
The mother troll, who in the fairy tales could be seen as a mirror-image
of the human mother, cannot stand to see its own child in pain. From having
been the evil mother she is transformed into the good, caring mother
who at the last moment saves her child. Herein lies the moral of the story;
the child shall be cared for despite its aberrant development, even though
it brings emotional pain and physical burden to others.
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