On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children

Abstract

Any physical handicap — be it blindness, deafness, or congenital feeblemindedness — not only alters a person’s relation to the world but above all affects relationships with people. An organic handicap or deficiency is actualized as socially abnormal behavior. Even in their own family, blind or deaf children are above all special children, and an exceptional, unusual relationship with them is formed, unlike their other children. Their misfortune alters their social position in the family before anywhere else. And this is true not only in regard to families where such children are viewed as an onerous burden and punishment but also where blind children are surrounded by twice as much love and ten times as much solicitude and tenderness — in these latter families, these increased doses of attention and pity add up to a heavy burden for the child and a barrier around him that separates him from other children. In his famous story, Korolenko accurately showed about the blind musician how the blind child became “the center of the family, an unconscious despot, where everything in the home conformed to his slightest whim.” As a child’s life goes on, the physical handicap produces a completely different social attitude in their environment than is the case with normal people. The abnormality in the “relational activity” between the individual and the world, as V.M. Bekhterev put it, turns out in practice to be a severe dysfunction of the whole system of social relations. All connections with people, every factor that determines the person’s geometric place in the social milieu, their role and fate as a participant in real life, all of the functions of social existence are restructured from a new perspective. The physical handicap causes a kind of social dislocation, very much like a physical dislocation, when an injured limb — an arm or leg — comes out