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A `Revenge' on Modern Times: Notes on Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) results from cerebral damage caused by a blow to the head, for example in a road traffic accident. The frequency of TBI means that it has been characterised as the silent epidemic of modern times. The majority of those who are head-injured are young men. This paper argues that the social reaction to head injury is testament to the latent eugenicist and mentalist suppositions within modernity. The brain-damaged person cannot readily overcome disability with the assistance of the technological aids available to those whose handicapping condition is physical. The consequences that head injury has for the mind and for the `self' entail the special sequestration of those who are head-injured from modernity's concerns with reflexivity and with the paramount cultural and material importance of the mind, whatever is said about the sociological significance of `body matters'. Because TBI brings in its wake the liminality of being `neither here nor there', of young men who become once again `children', the implications for family dynamics are both distinctive and profound. The `future', around which much of modernity revolves, is denied to those whose catastrophe arose from these same modern times.

Key Words: Disability • mind • modernity • traumatic brain injury

Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 3, 541-555 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/0038038598032003008


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