Rethinking IDD Relationships Through Dramaturgy and Frommian Humanism
By Addison Alvarado
Traditional medical and behavioral paradigms systematically reduce individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) to diagnostic categories and functional deficit configurations, and while modern social care infrastructures frequently succeed in maintaining physical survival, they routinely fail to foster relational dignity. Sociologist E. Susman observed that it is “not the functional limitation of impairment which constitutes the greatest problems faced by disabled individuals, but rather societal and social responses to it” [8]. Under these arrangements, disabled individuals are often coerced into automaton conformity – sometimes manifesting in mindlessly echoing neurotypical social performances merely to achieve a tenuous proximity to acceptance. Yet, as psychoanalyst Erich Fromm famously declared, “A person is not a thing”[3,4]. To analyze how these deficit models operate, we must understand disability as an interaction performance constructed through Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical stage and disciplined by Michel Foucault’s institutional surveillance. As Ian Hacking synthesized, “Foucault proposed his various ideas of a structure that determines discourse and action from the top down. Goffman gave us the local incidents and idiosyncrasies that lead us from the bottom up. Both are essential for understanding,” [6] demonstrating that personhood itself is “developed, accorded, and denied in the interaction order” [8].
While Goffman and Foucault elucidate the interactional choreography and institutional mechanics of social control, Erich Fromm supplies the normative psychological framework explaining why these structural arrangements dehumanize the individual. Fromm contrasts a transactional “Having” mode of existence – wherein human beings and social relationships are objectified, possessed, and evaluated as market commodities – with a humanistic “Being” mode centered on authentic presence, shared vulnerability, and mutual self-realization. Under modern industrial capitalism, the dominant social character compels individuals to view themselves and others through a “marketing orientation,” converting emotional life into exchange value. As O’Donnokoé, Jammerman, and Kühn assert, “By drawing on Fromm’s humanism, we can critique and reject any form of sociality that scales, excludes, exploits, or abandons human beings to death, while keeping universal equality, the shared relationality of all human beings, and the vulnerability that comes with it as both the starting point and the horizon of thought”[5]. Consequently, this article posits that the systemic relational devaluation of individuals with IDD is driven by the convergence of ableist social scripting and capitalist market commodification; by synthesizing Goffmanian dramaturgical analysis with Frommian humanistic psychoanalysis, critical disability advocates can deconstruct institutional control regimes and catalyze conditions for authentic agency, mature love, and relation being across romantic, familial, and professional caregiving domains[3].
Romantic Relationships – Scripting vs. Authentic “Being”
Empirical research in disability studies confirms that adults with IDD possess the same fundamental desires for romantic partnership, sexual intimacy, and emotional connection as their non-disabled peers; yet, their intimate lives remain heavily policed and restricted by institutional environments. Among individuals with IDD, romantic and sexual self-determination remains one of the most heavily policed arenas of the human experience, and quantitative investigations reveal that individuals with IDD frequently experience profound romantic isolation due to systemic barriers, including restrictive group home rules, lack of physical privacy, and negative caregiver attitudes. Systemic policies among caregivers and service providers routinely impose an ableist competence script, obligating individuals with IDD to demonstrate cognitive, financial, or independent self-sufficiency before being granted societal permission to engage in dating, marriage, or adult intimacy.
Analyzing these findings through a performance lens reveals that when individuals with IDD actively pursue romantic relationships, engage in physical affection, or express gender identity, their actions constitute what performance theorist Richard Schechner terms ‘restored behavior’ – reclaiming existing mainstream cultural courtship rituals and restaging them on disabled terms. Navigating romance on these terms further necessitates operating within Alison Kafer’s conceptualization of temporality that bends normative social schedules and expectations to accommodate disabled bodies and minds: “crip time.”[8] By claiming romantic agency, disabled individuals step off the institutional front stage and establish a private backstage region where, as Goffman observes, the individual can “relax, step out of character, and drop the act [or descend further into their individual authenticity] in an attempt to be more real” [2], escaping the constant clinical gaze of support staff.
Frommian theory provides a critical lens for understanding why individuals with IDD are uniquely marginalized in modern dating while offering a pathway toward authentic connection. Modern dating culture is dominated by Fromm’s ‘marketing orientation,’ where prospective partners assess one another as commodities with exchange values based on social status, physical symmetry, and economic productivity [4,5]. Since capitalist societies devalue disabled people under productivity metrics, individuals with IDD are systemically excluded from mainstream dating markets. However, when individuals with IDD build romantic bonds grounded in mutual presence rather than status exchange, they subvert market commodification, shifting from a romance of “Having” – possessing a status-symbol partner – to a relationship of “Being.” In The Art of Loving, Fromm emphasizes that “This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion; it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, the society,”[7] realized as such through four core pillars: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Practicing respect and knowledge requires partners, families, and support staff to look beyond diagnostic labels and honor the internal emotional reality of the person with IDD.
Parent-Child Dynamics –The Rehearsal of Autonomy
Current standing research on family dynamics demonstrates that the domestic environment is the primary arena where individuals with IDD develop self-determination and autonomous decision-making skills. In their study of adolescents with IDD and their parents, Tauba and Wener (2023) found that Parental Support of Autonomous Decision-Making (PADM) is a critical environmental predictor of a young person’s sense of agency. When parents provide choices, encourage problem-solving, and respect their child’s preferences, they initiate a “virtuous circle by offering greater opportunities for self-determination within the home” [9]. Conversely, when parents exhibit overprotective or controlling behaviors, individuals with IDD report lower perceived competence, reduced self-efficacy, and persistent dependency into adulthood.
Performance theory helps unpack the subtle micro-interactions that occur within the family home. The public persona of the “Special Needs Parent” often functions as a staged social performance built around narratives of tragedy, heroism, or martyrdom. Acting as a ‘performance team,’ parents and children navigate public scrutiny together; however, this staging can inadvertently cast the adult with IDD as a passive prop or perpetual child. Everyday domestic tasks – such as cooking, dressing, managing money – function as international rituals that assign active authority to parents and passive compliance to offspring. Goffman observes that in face-to-face encounters, individuals are allotted “a kind of sacredness that is displayed and confirmed by symbolic acts” [8]. As Gareth Thomas demonstrates, respecting an individual’s personhood requires honoring their ideal sphere through avoidance rituals (refraining from uninvited intercessions) and presentation rituals (validating capability and offering praise). When parents complete domestic tasks for a disabled offspring without invitation, they violate their ideal sphere and enforce learned passivity.
Fromm’s psychoanalytic framework explains the emotional driver behind parental overprotection. While unconditional motherly love protects the vulnerable child, Fromm asserts that the ultimate ethical test of parental love is the “will to separate” – wishing for the child’s independence and supporting their detachment [1,4]. In IDD contexts, understandable parental fear of societal discrimination frequently turns protective care into chronic overprotection, trapping parent and child in symbiotic union. To break this cycle, parents must transition from rigid directors enforcing compliance to improvisational partners. Integrating Eva Feder Kittay’s ethics of care and concept of nested dependencies, families can offer a secure safety net while empowering young adults with IDD to exercise their fundamental human right to self-determination [9].
Professional Caregiving – The Bureaucratic “Front Stage”
In supported living and community services, there is a profound structural tension between administrative institutional goals and the relational quality of life for individuals with IDD. In group home settings and Community Learning Disability Teams (CLDTs), professional caregiving is heavily dominated by bureaucratic risk management, standardized shift routines, and regulatory paperwork. Often, support workers face a performative dilemma: maintaining a professional, risk-averse front stage for management and inspectors while attempting to sustain warm, humanistic connections with residents in backstage spaces.
Crucially, it is demonstrated that when residents with IDD express frustration, reject rigid schedules, or assert personal autonomy, institutional systems routinely reclassify these expressions as clinical pathology or “challenging behavior”. In their critical discourse analysis of referral dossiers, Nunkoosing and Hydon-Laurelut (2016) documented how staff documentation transforms living individuals into administrative tests – exemplifying Foucault’s critique of “this turning of real lives into writing” [6]. For example, this type of documentation of individuals manifests in a myriad of ways:
In one case, a group home resident, Dennis, challenged a care worker’s public reprimand by asking, “Are you going to tell others not to eat their food?” [6]. Rather than recognizing the validity of the resident's objection to being publicly singled out and humiliated, staff officially logged his statement as a verbal attack, triggering a formal care plan review. In another case, a resident, Harry, asked staff, “Why don’t you know?” when they dismissed his inquiry about a local community event; staff documented his refusal to accept institutional indifference as clinical agitation and living in “Harry's world” [6].
These empirical cases illustrate Goffman’s concepts of mortification of self – enforced “obligations of deference and obedience to the staff” – and interaction looping. Looping occurs when “an agency that creates a defensive response on the part of the inmate takes this very response as the target of its next attack” [6]. As aforementioned, Dennis’s attempt to preserve face was weaponized by the institution to justify tighter surveillance aiming to produce docile bodies that are “subjected, used, transformed and improved” [6].
Subverting this bureaucratic alienation requires transforming caregiving practices through Fromm’s “Art of Listening” and Goffmanian deference rituals [1,4,9]. In his ethnographic study of learning-disabled adults working in a community café, Gareth Thomas observed that when non-disabled patrons and staff engage in presentation rituals (praise, active listening) and avoidance rituals (giving workers time and space to complete tasks without uninvited intrusion), they affirm the workers' adult personhood. Conversely, when patrons engage in interaction transgressions – such as infantilizing workers or speaking past them to managers – they inflict symbolic degradation. Similarly, reimagining professional caregiving requires support staff to shed the clinical gaze, abandon institutional looping, and practice genuine presence, deep listening, and ceremonial deference [1,6,9].
Centering the relational lives of individuals with IDD demonstrates that disability is neither a static medical deficit nor a passive condition, but an active negotiated human experience. While performance theory and Foucauldian analysis illuminate how interaction orders and institutional archives construct disabled identities and enforce compliance, Erich Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis provides the ethical framework explaining why these structures alienate the human soul – and how they can be overcome through authentic Being.
Ultimately, human rights and relational dignity are realized in the concrete, daily interactions of disabled individuals. As O’Donnokoé, Jamermann, and Kühn remind us, humanistic universalism maintains, “universal equality, the shared relationality of all human beings, and the vulnerability that comes with it as both the starting point and horizon of thought” [5]. Fromm declared in The Sane Society that the ultimate purpose of human life is to “love it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake” [3,4].
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