Flawed by Dasein? Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology, and the Personal Experience of Physiotherapy

Cartesian dualism and disabled phenomenology

“…In reorienting critical phenomenology to this problematic substance ontology, I by no means want to discount the important work that has been done 'embodying' disability studies; on the contrary, we have more work to do together. I substantiate this future work in 'disabled phenomenology' (Abrams 2014c(Abrams , 2014d, a critical and interdisciplinary project that takes embodied human difference as its fundamental point of departure. This project critically examines how personhood, disabled or otherwise, is a product of the interaction order (Goffman 1983), a socio-material outcome, rather than a naturalized, ahistorical and pre-social state of affairs as realized in rational subjectivity.…”

“…Yes, so long as we restrict ourselves to persons with spinal cord injury and their physical exclusion from society, then the impairment/disability dichotomy is both convincing and emancipatory. But when we consider other cases of impairment (such as fibromyalgia), 12 when we what it means to be excluded or included (Paterson 2012;Abrams 2014c), when disabled persons want to talk about tragedy (Abrams 2014a) when disabled people want to organize around their individual impairments (Shakespeare 2012)in each of these moments, the social model loses its purchase. My point here is not to pick on social model adherents in isolation, but rather to highlight how substance ontology manifests within the disability studies literature, of which the social model is a prominent (and thus familiar) contribution.…”

“…16 The ontological difference allows us to do so, and to do so critically. Reflecting on my personal experience of rehabilitation therapy, for instance, I map the process of 'ontological differentiation'the translation of Dasein into objective presencein the cultivation of symptoms of neuromuscular disorder (Abrams 2014c). To experience a fall and to report a fall to a physical therapist as a symptom of muscle disease are two different things.…”

Connectivity: An emerging concept for physiotherapy practice

“…Drawing on the writings of philosophers like Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961, phenomenology has been a powerful influence in health care, and latterly on physiotherapy (Abrams 2014;Bjorbaekmo and Engelsrud, 2011;Groven and Engelsrud, 2013;Shaw and Connelly, 2012;Standal and Engelsrud, 2013).…”

Jürgen Habermas and the dilemmas of experience of disability

“…Works are also known in which authors strive to depict experience of a particular disabled person from the perspective of a chosen philosophical theory, for example, phenomenology (Toombs, , pp. 9–11, 16–17) or from the point of view of a physiotherapist undergoing a therapy (Abrams, , pp. 432, 440–441).…”