Chasing the Intact Mind

In Chasing the Intact Mind, Amy Lutz traces the history of the “intact mind” concept, explaining how it influences current disability policy and practice in the United States. Lutz describes how we got to this moment, where the severely autistic are elided out of public discourse and the intensive, disability-specific supports they need defunded or closed altogether. Lutz argues that focusing on the intact mind and marginalizing those with severe disability reproduces historic patterns of discrimination that yoked human worth to intelligence, and that it is only by making space for the impaired mind that we will be able to resolve these ongoing clashes–as well as even larger questions of personhood, dependency, and care.